What Is Performance Anxiety?
Performance anxiety is a very common phenomenon that many teens experience today. It can show up in a variety of situations, such as fear of failure in exams, public speaking, or athletic and other extracurricular activities. While the severity of this can vary depending on the individual and how extreme their anxiety is, many teens I work with struggle with it impacting significant areas of their functioning.
While a certain level of performance anxiety including nervousness prior to a test, game, or other event is a normal part of life, some teens find themselves stuck, trapped in an anxious pattern that is much more severe and also not something they recover from very well. In these more extreme cases, teens suffer from a fear of failure, a lack of confidence, or a feeling of being judged by others. These thoughts are usually connected to physical symptoms such as sweating, shaking, or a racing heart that may even lead to a panic attack. Any level of performance that is perceived by the teen as less than expected of themselves can result in them beating themselves up with significant negative self-talk such as “I’m stupid,” “I’m a failure,” “I’m worthless,” or “something’s wrong with me.”
What Contributes To This
Essentially it can be attributed to biological, environmental, and psychological factors. Biologically, some teens may be more prone to anxiety due to genetic factors or hormonal imbalances. Since mental health can have a genetic component, teens with anxious parents or other family members with anxiety may very likely have a greater probability of anxiety themselves.
Environmental Factors
Environmental factors can also have a role in performance anxiety in teens. For instance, growing up in a high-stress environment or experiencing traumatic events can increase the likelihood of developing anxiety. Additionally, societal and or parental pressures to succeed in academics, sports, or other activities can create a stressful environment for teenagers.
Psychological Factors
Other teens experience psychological factors that make them more prone to performance anxiety. Teens with high negative self-talk, irrational beliefs, and low self-esteem are certainly more at risk. These teens often don’t have the skills to calm their nervous system enough to self-regulate, and therefore can’t see a different story than the one they are telling themselves. When the fear of failure or being judged negatively by others is high, and teens don’t have a way to challenge the accuracy of that story, they can find themselves in a negative loop of extreme anxiety and shame.
Overall, performance anxiety is a complex issue with multiple contributing factors. By understanding the causes of performance anxiety, individuals can take steps to manage their anxiety and improve their performance in various areas of life.
Helping Teens and Parents
Teens can be resilient once given tools and skills to help manage their anxiety. As a therapist, I work individually with teens using CBT, EMDR and Exposure Response Prevention modalities to help teens recognize shame triggers, the story they are telling themselves, and to help them seek safety and connection with grounding techniques that can help them see a different perspective.
Parents often need training themselves. In fact, I’ve never met an anxious teen who didn’t have a parent who also had some level of anxiety, and or high expectations of themselves and their teen. While parents have good intentions, often their own insecurities and lack of vulnerability can be a huge contributor to their teen not feeling capable or safe to address their fears.
In my Combating Teen Anxiety coaching program, I help parents and teens both learn to identify their own emotional language, barriers to effective communication, and start to work together to begin to communicate from a less defensive place. When this happens, a stronger connection forms between parents and teens and they can begin to repair breaches in past relational issues. By taking accountability and authentically apologizing for each other’s role in a situation, they develop coping strategies and feel less shame overall, which leads to stronger adult-parent relationships when teens launch out of the nest.