Okay, so it's Monday morning. Most people are heading back to work or heading back to school. And it's fair to say most people would have a sense of trepidation, even if they're going back to their normal training, their normal schools, or even their normal jobs. And we have a little bit of trepidation, everybody does, it's a very human trait because there's the unknown. We're not Mystic Meg. And for those of you who are not British and don't know who Mystic Meg was, she was a newspaper columnist who used to predict your future based on your star sign. That's not something that I hold much faith in, but some do. Anyway, so as we go back into even the familiar environments, there's a natural sense of trepidation. It's a human trait, and it's designed really to protect us. It's a self-preservation mechanism. And because of that self-preservation mechanism, we can sometimes overdo that. We can sometimes get caught up in the things that we think are going to be different or unpredictable. So let's get into it.
One of the first things I ask when I sit down with these groups, be those athletes, be those coaches, be that organisations, be that businesses, I will say to them, 'What's concerning you? What are the things that are keeping you up at night?' And I'll get a whole array of different responses from people from, didn't have a great year in 2024; I don't want to repeat that; I don't want to make the same mistakes. If you're an athlete, I got injured in 2024. I don't want that to happen to me again. I want to be proactive and back performing the way that I know I can. I've got a big year coming up this year. I've got a selection. I've got criteria to hit, and I don't want to make mistakes.
A lot of what people's perception of anxiety is comes from the fear of what could go wrong. And that's natural. That's a human trait. That's a survival mechanism, as I said. And it's designed for us to try and future-proof ourselves by coming up with some strategies to eliminate that or evade that, or if it does happen, to manage that.
I'll often tell them initially, let's not be scared of what you're going through. Let's not try to eliminate it altogether. We don't want to not have any thought processes around what could go wrong. We want to be able to prepare ourselves for things that may eventuate, things that may pop up, things that we can't predict. So these key things are important to us as a survival mechanism, certainly as a planning process for competition and high performance. We want to be able to plan for things that we could potentially predict may not pan out the way we want them to.
So it's not necessarily about being scared of it. It's not necessarily about trying to avoid it. It certainly doesn't serve us to hide from it. What I'll also ask them is to be specific. What specifically are the things that you're concerned about, the things that are keeping you up at night, the things that when you get up in the morning make you feel a little bit nervous about going in, or when you think about the season coming up, you might turn around and go, Oh, maybe I haven't done enough. Maybe I'm not ready. Maybe this is not the right time. And as I said, people give us a whole variety of different explanations and specifics around what keeps them up at night. And they'll think that that sense or that vein of anxiety is unique to them.
When I tell them anxiety is a cycle, there's multiple different phases of anxiety, and each form of phase of anxiety leads into the next. It's compounding. People become even more anxious – which might sound counterintuitive when I'm trying to teach them how to better manage their anxiety – when they find out that the anxiety cycle is perpetual.
What I wanted to do today, as you head off into a new year, where it might be a whole new set of objectives you're going after, it might be a new team that you're in. It might be a new club you're at. You might have new coaches. You might be going into a new position as a coach, a new position in your organisation. I want to give you some better understanding about the anxiety cycle. And we're first going to start at looking at what anxiety is not. Before we focus on what this form of performance anxiety is, we've got to really understand what it is not.
The first thing to understand is anxiety is not a disease. You're not broken. There's nothing wrong with you. You're not ill. By having performance anxiety doesn't mean that there's something wrong with you because there isn't. As I said before, you're doing exactly what your body, your brain is designed to do. It's designed to keep you alive. It's designed to preempt anything that could go wrong and help you come up with a strategy for it. So it's not a disease. So if you're having anxious thoughts, if you're really nervous, if you're going into competitions and the anxiety of that competition is overwhelming for you, there's nothing wrong with you. You're being incredibly human.
It's also not an indication of your true capacity or your true talent as an athlete. So if you're anxious, that doesn't mean that you're not good at what you do. It doesn't mean that your preparation isn't necessarily good enough.
The other thing that we've got to be very conscious and cognisant of is it's really common. And actual fact, I think almost everybody that I have ever spoken to, myself included, gets nervous. And being nervous isn't a bad thing. The fact that it is not uncommon means that everybody has their own versions of this cycle. Everybody has different phases of this cycle that have a bigger impact on them. But they still go through this very same cycle.
And the last thing for us to recognise is, it's not terminal. Anxiety in this format will not kill you. It might feel like it at times. It might feel like that what you're going up against is all consuming. The consequences of getting it wrong might feel like they're terminal to you or your career. But the reality is that's not true. The reality is that this anxiety that you're going through is manageable, is normal, and there's some structures and strategies and framework that we can put around it for us to better control it.
Performance anxiety is a threat perception. At some point, something in your brain has indicated that you should be highly aware of something. There's some consequences that could happen that could change the way that you perform, the way that you do what you do. And you just need to be aware of it. What may threaten one person may not threaten somebody else. What one person might heighten as being an impact on their performance, another may see as being a benefit to their performance. That being said, it will have a physical impact on your body. Be that your immune system, be that your fight, flight, or freeze system, be that the way that your heart pumps blood around your body, even the areas of your body that is being pumped with blood.
So depending on how you filter your perception of threat will dictate which bodily reactions your body will initiate. And we'll talk about that in greater detail a little bit later in this episode.
The fourth thing to understand that it is, is a sequential process. As I said before, this is a cycle. And as we go through this cycle, each phase of the cycle leads into the next phase. And when it leads into the next phase, there's a trigger that triggers it in to that phase and out of the phase you're currently in. And that's normally when your brain has set a metric. When I hit this, it goes to the next level. There's more things to be scared of. So that confirmation bias, we've set this metric that when we get to this stage, it is going to be catastrophic. Often it's catastrophic because we've set that up for ourselves. And that's sometimes incredibly difficult for us to recognise that, you know what, the vast majority of this is, we've created it ourselves. We've set what we think could go wrong. We've set the consequences of what goes wrong. We've even set the metrics to prove that it's going to go wrong.
So we shouldn't be under any illusion or surprise when it goes wrong. We know, and we've talked already, that this is a very natural response and reaction. What's kept us alive as a species is this fear mechanism. We're not the fastest, we're not the strongest. We certainly don't have the biggest fangs or the biggest claws or the biggest muscles. So preparing is our superpower. It's what keeps us as a species alive. But it can be misused. And when it's misused, that is when it negatively impacts our mental state. So if performance anxiety is so unique to each one of us, yet we all go through the same process, how do we identify it? There are a couple of key indicators that will show you that you are going through an anxious state, be that self-created or be that as a consequence of something that somebody else has said to you. Sometimes our anxious state is caused by what somebody else says to us. They may increase the consequence of an action by saying to you, you must perform really well here, otherwise you don't get selected. Or, don't make that same mistake you made last year. And then all of a sudden, that mistake you made last year has been reintroduced into your thought process. Or they might say to you, If you don't do this, we're going to lose. And it's these degrees of external influences that can sometimes, because we're pack animals, compound that fear of what could go wrong.
So what are some of the indicators? We can have those physical indicators. We can feel sick. We can shake. We can forget what we're trying to do, and that's part of our fight or flight mechanism. We can have compounding negative thoughts where they just get deeper and deeper and darker and darker to the point where they are so scary. We can have avoidance mechanisms where we just try not to put ourselves in that situation, which intellectually is quite smart. But if we're a performer, and we know we've got to be there, then that's not a real option. However, there's been many, many times I've seen athletes that have done absolutely everything they possibly can to NOT compete. Sometimes that's where they withdraw themselves from a situation. Sometimes they re-imagine, and I use that word very carefully, injuries. Sometimes they can become fatigue-based injured, where they've overprepared because of the fear of what could go wrong. And sometimes they can just flatly refuse to compete.
All of these mechanisms are avoidance mechanisms, and they're survival mechanisms. You can also make the argument they're quite smart mechanisms, too. But when we're talking about high-performance, and we're talking about we have to perform because that's the place we've put ourselves, we put ourselves in that team, in that sport, to compete, then avoiding it isn't realistically an option to us.
Poor sleep is a classic condition of anxiety. And if I'm really honest with most of you, my form of anxiety, my Achilles heel, has always been poor sleep. And I've worked very hard throughout my life, and particularly in the last 10 to 15 years, on trying to course-correct that sleep mechanism so that I can improve that part of my self-management.
So if any of these or any other forms of performance anxiety are consistent with you, they're a good indicator that you're in an anxious state. Overthinking, avoiding, poor sleep, poor diet, poor challenges around your diet, poor performance. Each one of these have their unique triggers and their unique consequences.
And depending where your focus is as a performer, that will be your sticking point, that will be your flash point. So if sleep is an issue for you, like it is for me, I know historically, I would go through a cycle of being anxious about something. It would impact my sleep. The fact that it impacted my sleep, I became hyper-aware that I wasn't sleeping particularly well, so therefore wasn't recovering, and was struggling to perform, and I became consumed with sleep or the lack of it, which only compounded the fact that I wasn't sleeping.
So what do we need to do? Well, we need to understand the cycle. Some of those components of that cycle we've already discussed. But I'm going to take you through the eight phases of the performance anxiety cycle.
The first phase we've already talked about, that's awareness of perception. And the awareness of perception is when we turn around and go, something's coming up, something's important. Be that a selection, be that a competition, be that a skill or a performance that we just have to deliver. Now, that could be because it's important to us. It could be because it's important the team. It could be it's important to whatever we deem it to be important to. But that initial awareness that something is of a heightened importance will initially trigger the first phase of any form of anxiety, awareness.
I grew up in a pub in London. My parents ran public houses, hotels, bars. And when my wife and I are out now, there's often situations when we'll be in a public place and I'll say to my wife, something's going to kick off in here, something's not right. It could be a vibe. It could be the tone. It could be the atmosphere. I'm not quite sure exactly what it is, but almost always I'm right. I can sense it. My little spidey senses go off and I'll say to Linda, something's going to kick off, and it does. And she always says to me, How on earth do you know? And I go, I don't know. I don't know how I know. I just know it's going to happen. I can sense it. It's like a sixth sense. And this is essentially what we're talking about by that threat perception. It's something that just doesn't fit. And it's an early warning system to our brain that, Hey, something just could go on here. Something may happen that is going to impact what you choose to do, negatively. And that threat perception is that first phase of the anxiety cycle.
The second phase, once we've confirmed that, hey, this isn't feeling right, not sure quite what it is, but it just feels that something's off. It could go wrong. I'm a little bit nervous. There's a sense in the air. And as an athlete, it might be, I'm not feeling that my skills are hitting the level they should be. I'm not necessarily at the phase or the stage of the preseason that I anticipated I would be. Whatever that is, we then go into a heightened state. That heightened state is fear and apprehension. Even though we don't exactly know what could go wrong or why it might go wrong, it's just that Spidey sense. We then become so consumed with that, we go looking for it. And I'll often say to my clients, If you want to find something that's not going to work, you'll find it. Because if we dig deep enough, nothing is ever perfect. So we might find something that just slightly off, and then we'll give it so much value and so much grounds that we will make it go wrong purely and simply because we're over-focused on what could go wrong.
So that fear and apprehension is a very slippery slope, particularly as a performer. I'll often hear athletes say to me, I'm just waiting for the bubble to burst, and I'll go, why? Why should the bubble burst? If you've prepared well enough, if you're physically capable and you're competent enough, why should the bubble burst? Where's the law that says that bubble has to burst? There isn't one. It's just something where you're creating that possible outcome. And because you're so incredibly focused on it, you almost will it to happen. As an athlete, that sounds counterintuitive, right? But it's something that we can, and often do, create ourselves. I said to you at the start of this, the human brain is designed to create potential outcomes so that we can come up with a strategy to manage it. And that's because we're not the fastest, we're not the strongest, we don't have the fangs, we don't have the claws. We're certainly not the biggest. So we have to be the smartest. And this has kept us alive and at the top of the food chain for most of human civilization. And it is without a doubt our superpower as a species.
That being said, there are many, many, many times that we use that for evil. Almost all animals are reactive. If you've got a caterpillar crawling along the floor and you touch one of his antenna, it will crawl up into a ball. That's their survival mechanism. They're highly reactive. Then, as soon as their perception of that threat has gone, they'll continue you along the way. In fact, they'll turn up there again tomorrow. They'll follow that same path. You do the same thing again. It'll crawl up into a ball. You'll move away, it'll crawl away, and it'll be back again tomorrow. So this reactive survival mechanism is very primitive. Then there's a group of animals that have a memory. Think cats, dogs, squirrels, mice. And what they tend to try and do is remember what's happened. And so if something threatens them in a location, they'll remember that next time they get to that location, and they'll become a little bit more highly aware. What sets humans apart is our imagination. We believe we're the only species with an imagination. Probably the best example of this is the watering hole. When an animal goes to a watering hole, they know that there's been tigers and big predators there before, yet they'll still go there because it's necessary. And they won't be cautious until they see something that is that predator. Up until that time, they'll happily drink at the watering hole. So what sets humans apart? We think humans are are the only species with an imagination. What that means is we can imagine what could go wrong. We can imagine what could happen. We can imagine what we could create. And essentially, that's allowed us to create new buildings, architecture, even cities, towns, roads, you name it. None of those things existed before they existed, so we had to imagine them first. So the fact that we have this imagination is obviously an amazing skill to have. It's an amazing part of being human. It's certainly giving us the advantage over other species. But like I said, these great things can come at a cost, as with imagination. So let's go back to that watering hole. And all the other animals are there, happy, drinking at the watering hole until something threatens them. Then they'll react to that. If they're the animal that has a memory, they'll remember as soon as they see that threat, what they need to do. Because humans have an imagination, we don't sit and wait for the threat. We imagine the threat. And because we've imagined that threat, our brain is already starting to create strategies how to manage a potential attack. We may never see that lion. We may never, ever encounter that lion. But in the back of our brain, we're seeing our body parts floating through that watering hole, where that lion has ripped us in shreds and pulled us apart. Our brain does that because what it's looking to do is create the worst case scenario. And it's this worst case scenario that forms a huge part of our performance anxiety. Because it's now been entered into our head that if I go to this watering hole, the likelihood, even though it's not a likelihood, the likelihood is that there's a tiger there, and that tiger is going to rip me apart and use that watering hole like a fondue with my body parts. We're trying to create a strategy how to manage that. If we don't take it seriously, or if we don't take ourselves out of that situation, our brain will increase the potential of threat. It's going to increase the consequence of that threat. And it will go from, it's going to be scary, to it's going to be dangerous. It's going to go from it's going to be dangerous, it's going to be life-threatening. And it's going to be life-threatening to you and everybody that you care about.
So it's going to escalate until we pay attention and do something different about it. Now, if it was a real lion, tiger in that jungle, tiger, because lions and tigers are in different places. If it's a real tiger in that jungle, then that makes logical sense to get hell the out of that place. But as a high performing performer, we can't. We have to go into that scary place. We have to remain in that scary place. So that escalation of consequence isn't really helping. In fact, it's what forms the primary parts of that performance anxiety. Okay, so we're up to phase four. And by this point, I'm assuming most of you are starting to recognise some of these anxiety phases. They may not be the ones that are the sticky ones inside your brain, the most painful ones or the ones that have been highlighted to you as being the most important. Because it is a compounding process, there will be a recognition that some of these things are things that you've been through before.
So phase four is a psychophysiological arousal. That sounds huge, but essentially what your brain is doing is putting you on Defcon 4. And it's telling you something's coming, you've got to be aware of it. And the second it happens, we're going to press that big red button and we're going to evacuate. It's inevitable inside your mind. You've got to that stage where no longer are you worried about it happening. You're assuming it's going to happen and you're just waiting for it to happen. For me, this is where most athletes and performers start to become ultra-aware of their anxieties. The inevitability that something is just around the corner. That imminent threat. And because of that, the athlete is going to look for it and has already got one hand on the exit strategy going, 'When I see it, I'm out!' This part of the process is probably emotionally the first phase where an athlete or a performer will start to feel overwhelmed.
And because of that overwhelming feeling, it pushes us into phase five, which is our fight, flight, or freeze mechanism. And if any of you have listened to my dopamine, cortisol, and serotonin talk on what causes our fight, flight, or freeze, you'll understand the consequences of being in that highly stimulated survival mechanism – what it does to us psychologically and what it does to us physiologically, and certainly what it does to us emotionally.
Because of this, our fight, flight, or freeze is one of those human traits, those human survival mechanisms that is so critical to our survival, yet can absolutely get run away with itself so easily that it can turn from being our superpower into our nemesis. When we think about frontline service people, and there's a high degree of living in that fight, flight, or freeze mechanism, that survival phase, and what that does to them long term, and how that changes them on a cellular level, we can better understand as a high performing person, whether that's an athlete or as a coach, that being in that heightened stimulant state for so long can almost become normalised. When we normalise that heightened state, that survival mechanism place, we're not performing at our optimal. What we're doing is minimising risk. Or at least normalising risk. Neither of those are really ideal. Now, I've worked in enough high performance situations, both in sport and in business, where the most guilty party of using this fear are either coaches or bosses. By raising the consequence of what could happen to that individual, if they don't do the right thing, they're putting their employees or their athletes, their performers, in that heightened state of stimulation, that fight, flight, or freeze mechanism. And they're almost guaranteeing they won't be able to perform. Or if they do perform, they won't be able to replicate it and do it again and again and again.
So using fear to stimulate a response or reaction in your performer is such a poor choice of tool to use. It may give you that instant reaction from them, but it won't give you that high performance output. So if that is part of your strategy, and as I said, I've worked in so many high performance teams where coaches think that's the right thing to do, I could tell you stories and put your hair on the head. Think again. Try and find a different strategy.
Once we tip out of the fight, flight, or freeze mechanism, the next phase is a reduction in dexterity. This is a consequence from being in that high cortisol state. Your brain thinks that something is going to imminently kill you. So it reallocates and redistributes all your resources to those big muscles to get you out of there, get you out of the way. Make sure that you're not going to get eaten, ripped apart. But what that does do, it stops your ability to think logically. It certainly impacts your your ability to have fine motor skills. And as a performer, that can be catastrophic. Think of it like a piano player who can't touch and sense the keys. They're probably not going to play the tune that they want to play. Think about a tennis player who can't actually grip the racket the right way, can't feel those nuances because they're losing dexterity because of the fight, flight, or freeze mechanism. That's only going to compound their fear that they can't perform, which is going to raise cortisol, and we've got that cycle.
So as you can see, when we get to this phase where those fine motor skills are starting to be compromised, we've already started to feed ourselves into that confirmation bias. I can't do this. I'm not good enough. I haven't done enough. I'm not prepared enough. I shouldn't be here. So we can see that cycle is now well and truly embedded into what we're doing.
And this feeds us into phase seven, which is an increase in our negativity. No longer are we looking at solution-driven opportunities. No longer are we looking at, I know I can do this. I've done it before, logical thought process. We start to catastrophise. And as we catastrophise, our language replicates that catastrophising feeling of, 'We can't do this.' We know that our language will create the outcomes for us. It's our operating system inside our brain. If our language has been compromised. If we're only seeing what we don't have, can't do, the consequences of that, then we're not going to prep for performance. We're going to prep for survival. That just makes logical sense. The information that your body is receiving from your language is, 'Hey, this is going to go really wrong. We need to prepare for that. We need to be ready for the consequences.' And the consequences are going to be this, they're going to be that. This could happen, that could happen. This is going to go wrong. I'm going to feel like this. So that catastrophisation, our language is just going to replicate that.
And that's going to drive us into phase eight. And phase eight is, well, I knew it was going to happen. Told you. It's that confirmation state, that confirmation bias of I had every reason to be anxious. I should have been anxious. I've just found all of these reasons why I should have been anxious.
Now, you might think, got through that. I've been through all eight phases. What else could go wrong? It doesn't stop there. Just because we've been through all eight phases, we get back on that merry-go-round, and we go again. We feed back into that heightened perception, but at a whole new level. It's just not one and done. It's compounding. So performance anxiety isn't a singular cycle. It isn't only one of these phases. It's all of these phases. It's all of this cycle, and it's a compounding cycle. It's going to get deeper and deeper. It's going to become more familiar to you, and we're going to generalise and categorise and say, I can't do that. We're not going to be specific enough and say, Well, that's not working. Let me fix it. It's going to turn and say, I just can't do this. I'm not good enough. And we're going to talk ourselves out of being the performer that we probably know we should be.
So we've been through the eight phases of the anxiety cycle. We now know each of those phases. We understand what causes them. We understand the framework of them. We understand how they make us feel. We know why we have them, and we also know what they cost us. Each of these phases are important. They're necessary. They're part of our evolutionary survival mechanism, but they're also counterintuitive as a high-performance person. What we need to be able to do is better manage them. Learning to understand the cycle where you can pick up the cues of where you are in the cycle and to be able to unpack backwards to where that started, gives you a sense of control. When you know you're entering into a phase and you know why you're entering into that phase, being able to preemptively see it and better manage it will allow you to navigate it better. We may not be able to not be in it, but we don't necessarily have to sink in it. We can traverse through it and out the other side with control. And that's certainly been my thought process, too, introducing you to the anxiety cycle so that you can recognise it. You can recognise why you're in it, where you're in it, and how you got into it. We can then start to build tangible frameworks to better manage it.
I hope you've got a lot from this very detailed, very deep podcast. Until the next episode of Brain in the Game. Train smart and enjoy the ride. My name's Dave Diggle.
