Why Anxiety Prevents Me from Doing Sports and How to Overcome it

Anxiety can make exercise difficult by creating fear of failure or paralyzing physical symptoms. To overcome it, start with gentle activity, breathe deeply and focus on enjoying yourself. When it comes to sports, anxiety and discomfort can cause strange sensations that prevent you from enjoying all its physical and mental benefits.

Although this situation may be common, you should not get used to living with anxiety. In this PsychologyFor article, we will provide you with information about why anxiety prevents me from doing sports and how to overcome it with practical tips that will help you manage your emotions.

Why does anxiety prevent me from doing sports?

To detect why anxiety prevents you from doing sports, pay attention to the following main reasons:

• Fear of failure: High expectations can cause you high levels of anxiety. At the same time, the imagination of catastrophic scenarios is one of the main conditions that prevents enjoyment,
• Need for control: When faced with a stressful situation, the lack of control can cause frustration and persistent discomfort. Furthermore, it is impossible to control all the variables that come into play during a sport, which causes anxiety.
• Traumatic experiences: having gone through unpleasant moments during competitions or recreational activities can increase accumulated anxiety. Likewise, past emotions can reappear during the present and prevent a good connection with leisure. In this case, you may be interested in this article on How to overcome psychological trauma.
• Family pressures: those words and ideas that come from close family members have a noticeable influence on our thoughts, emotions and behaviors. For example, demands associated with winning competitions, punishments for errors, violent situations due to sporting failures, inability to master frustrations, among others.
• Biological diseases: There are some clinical pathologies that cause complications when performing a sport. Likewise, an organic condition can affect the sports performance of a person who suffers from anxiety. Here we can place diseases such as multiple sclerosis, epilepsy or Alzheimer’s, among others.
• Injuries: They usually occur due to incorrect movements during sports practices or after certain periods of time. In this sense, physical problems limit an athlete’s performance and can affect self-esteem.

What happens if when I do sports I get anxious?

To understand all the symptoms in greater detail, it is important that we pay attention to the associated behaviors, emotions and thoughts. Related to this point, find out what happens if I get anxious when I do sports:

• Decreased physical performance: Anxiety can cause muscle stiffness, which decreases your ability to move fluidly and can increase your risk of injury.
• Increased risk of injury: can lead you to push yourself beyond your natural limits, increasing the risk of overuse injuries or accidents.
• Demotivation and aversion to exercise: If you associate sports with feelings of anxiety, you could develop an aversion to physical exercise. This can reduce your motivation to play sports in the long term, affecting your physical and mental health.
• Cardiovascular problems: Although sport is good for cardiovascular health, if you have an anxiety attack while doing it, you could experience an increase in heart rate and blood pressure, which can be dangerous, especially if you have heart problems.
• mental fatigue: Anxiety during sport can be mentally draining, leaving you feeling mentally drained after training, even if it wasn’t physically intense.

It is essential that the definitive diagnosis be made by a mental health professional. In this sense, aspects such as age, sex, genetic background, pre-existing diseases and other mental health disorders are considered. To understand it better, we recommend you read this article on Motivation in sports: theories, classification and characteristics.

How to overcome anxiety in sport

Although anxiety can deteriorate any physical activity that is carried out, the truth is that there are alternatives to overcome it. These types of tips have proven to be efficient in overcoming anxiety in sports. Take note!

• Visualize: consists of imagining positive situations in which there is a favorable outcome. To do this, you must practice this technique for several weeks until you achieve full and conscious attention. In this article we explain what creative visualization is and how to do it.
• Identify stressors: to feel an improvement in your mood, it is important to know what are the reasons that cause discomfort. One of the most effective methods is to write down those thoughts that cause anxiety, with the aim of modifying them.
• Change expectations: If you strive for perfection in any sport you do, chances are you will perform poorly. This is because you will not be happy with your performance and that will increase anxiety. Instead of aiming for ideal results, it is preferable to replace them with possible and realistic goals.
• Go to recreational spaces: We all need moments of fun. To do this, go to places that allow you to achieve the necessary relaxation to face sports practice with peace of mind. Cinema, theater and social gatherings can be good options.
• Attend support groups: The help of other people can be effective in combating the symptoms of anxiety in sports. In these types of places, group viewing can improve confidence and provide security when doing a sport.
• Seek professional help: If you feel like you can’t deal with anxiety, it’s time to contact a mental health professional. Therapy provides tools to cope with stressful situations in a more enjoyable way.

This article is merely informative, at PsychologyFor we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

If you want to read more articles similar to Why anxiety prevents me from doing sports and how to overcome it we recommend that you enter our Clinical Psychology category.

References:

• Menéndez Fierros, DE, Becerra Hernández, A. (2020). Anxiety in young athletes: a comparative study between men and women. Horizonte Sanitario Magazine, 19 (1), 127-135.
• Zaldívar Navarrete, EM (2021). The impact of anxiety on young athletes. Contemporary Dilemmas Magazine: Education, Politics and Values, 2 (35), 1-17.