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RESEARCHERS

The science of sports performance anxiety: why the pressure that should help you can make you choke

3 the researchers behind it — Your brain runs a script: nerves mean you're not ready, pressure always makes it worse, and choking proves you don't have what it takes. Over a centur

Bangor University (Institute for the Psychology of Elite Performance)

Lew Hardy

Known for:The catastrophe model of anxiety and performance — how worry turns rising arousal into a sudden collapse instead of a graceful decline

Key findings

  1. 1990

    Proposed that cognitive anxiety (worry) and physiological arousal interact: with low worry, performance follows the classic inverted-U, but with high worry, rising arousal can trigger a sudden catastrophic drop rather than a gradual decline. ↗

  2. 2003

    With Tim Woodman, meta-analyzed competitive-sport studies and found self-confidence (r = 0.24) a significantly stronger predictor of performance than cognitive anxiety (r = -0.10). ↗

  3. 2007

    With Stuart Beattie and Tim Woodman, tested effort required as an asymmetry factor in the catastrophe model and found support for hysteresis: performance drops suddenly at a different arousal point than the one at which it later recovers. ↗

Royal Holloway, University of London (Emeritus)

Michael W. Eysenck

Known for:Attentional control theory — how anxiety hijacks the brain's top-down attention system and biases it toward threat

Key findings

  1. 2007

    With Nazanin Derakshan, Rita Santos and Manuel Calvo, proposed attentional control theory: anxiety impairs the inhibition and shifting functions of working memory and biases attention toward threat-related stimuli, harming processing efficiency more than performance effectiveness. ↗

  2. 2009

    With Nazanin Derakshan, extended the theory's account of the effectiveness-efficiency distinction, showing that anxious performers often compensate with extra effort — so accuracy can look normal even while far more mental resources are being burned to achieve it. ↗

University of Chicago

Sian L. Beilock

Known for:Experimental work on choking under pressure — how performance stress consumes the working memory skilled performance depends on

Key findings

  1. 2005

    Performance pressure harmed only individuals high in working memory capacity, and only on math problems with the highest working-memory demands — pressure consumes the capacity that the most qualified performers rely on. ↗

  2. 2007

    Pressure-induced worry can reduce performance on tasks that draw on fluid intelligence: higher-working-memory individuals, who normally use demanding strategies, lose their advantage when pressure co-opts that capacity. ↗

  3. 2011

    A ten-minute expressive-writing exercise about test worries, completed immediately before an exam, significantly improved students' scores — with the largest benefits for habitually test-anxious students. ↗

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