Summary: Researchers explain how stress affects both body and mind, and offer practical strategies athletes and others can use to reduce its negative effects.
Source: The Conversation
Being a professional athlete is demanding in more ways than one. Beyond intense physical exertion, athletes often face enormous psychological pressure that can produce powerful, sometimes debilitating, bodily reactions.
Eighteen-year-old British tennis player Emma Raducanu described how, during Wimbledon, she struggled to regulate her breathing and heart rate in a match — sensations she attributed to the buildup of excitement and adrenaline. Other high-profile athletes have reported similar episodes, illustrating that performance stress can produce real and immediate physiological effects.
Stress responses vary widely from person to person, but they are largely shaped by the interaction between demands and resources. Demands include the physical and mental effort required, uncertainty about outcomes, potential injury, and the threat to self-esteem. Resources are the coping abilities a person brings to the situation: confidence, perceived control, experience, and motivation.
Evaluating stress
How someone interprets the balance between demands and resources determines whether their reaction is constructive or harmful. When people feel their resources match or exceed the demands, they tend to enter a “challenge” state: physiologically aroused in a way that supports attention, speed, and energy delivery to the muscles and brain. When demands feel overwhelming relative to resources, they enter a “threat” state: stress hormones and physiological changes that impair decision making and performance.
For athletes, factors such as a larger crowd, higher expectations, tougher opponents, or unfamiliar conditions can increase perceived demands. If the athlete doesn’t feel adequately prepared or in control, those increased demands can trigger a threat response, undermining performance even in otherwise skilled players.
Consequences of stress
Challenge and threat states influence the release and interaction of hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. During a challenge state, adrenaline increases cardiac output and dilates blood vessels, improving oxygen and nutrient delivery to working muscles and the brain. This physiological profile is consistently associated with better performance across many sports.
In contrast, a threat state involves higher cortisol levels that blunt some of adrenaline’s benefits, constrict blood vessels, raise blood pressure, and slow cognitive processing. These changes can produce more anxiety, poorer decision making, and reduced motor control — all of which harm competitive performance.
Anxiety itself is common under pressure and can show up as increased heart rate, sweating, palpitations, tremors, shortness of breath, headaches, nausea, stomach pain, or a strong urge to escape. It also reduces concentration and self-regulation, which can lead to overthinking and further performance decline. The intensity of anxiety depends on how strongly demands outweigh perceived resources, and the same physiological arousal can be experienced subjectively as either excitement or debilitating nervousness.
Coping mechanisms
Repeated negative stress responses are harmful to physical and mental health and can increase long-term risks such as heart disease and depression. Fortunately, athletes and others can be trained to respond more positively under pressure by strengthening their perceived resources and changing how they interpret bodily signals.
Language and coaching matter. Encouraging phrases that build confidence and emphasize control can shift an athlete’s mindset toward a challenge response. Sport psychologists help reframe physiological symptoms — for example, interpreting a rapid heartbeat as excitement rather than fear — which can transform the impact of those sensations on performance.
Psychological skills such as visualization and mental rehearsal are effective tools. Imagining past successes or picturing oneself performing well in future competitions enhances confidence and a sense of control, reducing the likelihood of a threat response. Visualization can calm physiological arousal and prime the brain for effective action under pressure.
Training that simulates competitive pressure also helps athletes develop coping habits. Introducing elements like scoring against peers, time constraints, or audience-like conditions raises the demands during practice while keeping them in a controlled environment. Over time, repeated exposure builds familiarity and resilience, so athletes experience similar stressors as manageable rather than overwhelming.
In short, stress responses are not fixed. With appropriate mental skills training, supportive coaching language, and realistic practice simulations, athletes can learn to interpret stress as a source of energy and focus rather than a signal to withdraw. This ability to manage stress is one reason athletes can perform remarkable feats under pressure.
Funding: Jamie Barker receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council.
About this stress research news
Source: The Conversation
Contact: Jamie Barker and Andrew Wilkinson – The Conversation
Image: The image is in the public domain