Surprisingly, even world-famous performers, such as Andrea Bocelli or Jennifer Lawrence, can experience anxiety before a performance. It’s actually very common and normal to experience a nervous feeling mixed with excitement right before an important performance.

What happens when this nervousness becomes crippling and starts to affect your outcome and success? That’s what we call performance anxiety.

Performance anxiety can be concerning any sort of performance from singing to dancing, or even a work-related meeting presentation. Let’s take a deeper look at what performance anxiety is.

What is performance anxiety? 

Performance anxiety is the excessive fear or worry about one’s ability to perform a specific task. Unfortunately, performance anxiety can affect anyone regardless of age, gender or background. Some people feel it only once while others can feel it every time they perform.

Performance anxiety may feel like:

- Discomfort in the stomach

- Intense avoidance behaviors such as postponing the performance or backing out last minute

- Shaking, feeling jittery or nauseous

- Increased heart rate

The most common forms of performance anxiety

Even though performance anxiety can involve any task, there are some common situations in which many people feel an intense feeling of anxiety. Here are the most common examples of performance anxiety:

Sex performance anxiety 

Sex performance anxiety is actually more common than one may think. Usually, sex performance anxiety goes hand in hand with negative body image, difficulties during sex due to health issues, and/or fear of rejection.

When someone has sex performance anxiety, they find themselves in a toxic chain. Anxiety affects sex performance negatively. As a result, sex performance declines. In the end, disappointing sex performance creates more anxiety.

Test anxiety

Amongst students, test anxiety is one of the most important reasons why even a hardworking student can fail to complete an exam successfully. Approximately about 25 to 40% of US students suffer from test anxiety in the U.S.

Test anxiety usually feels like psychological stress, worry about succeeding academically, fear of failure, and self-doubt.

Even though some students can do better with test anxiety, there is also a significant portion of students whose results and success gets affected negatively because of test anxiety.

Athletic performance anxiety

As humans, we tend to feel more motivated and do better under some pressure. However, if this pressure is more than motivating, probably it’s time to take an action.

Athletic performance anxiety may feel like not being able to sleep the night before the performance, excessive worry, or skipping a lot of the planned steps during the performance.

Athletic performance anxiety may be caused due to self-esteem issues, not practicing sufficiently, fear of success or fear of failure.

Public speaking anxiety 

Public speaking anxiety, also known as stage fright, affects about 73% of the population according to the National Society Anxiety Center. Public speaking anxiety is actually considered a part of social anxiety disorder.

Usually, public speaking anxiety involves fear of rejection, fear of being judged, fear of failure, and fear of being embarrassed in front of others. People can feel public speaking anxiety when they are about to present a topic in a meeting, sing a song, act performance, or even present a topic in a classroom.

One of the biggest worries of someone who experiences public speaking anxiety is freezing or forgetting parts during the performance. Even though this is unlikely, anxiety actually makes this more likely to happen. As a result, just like in the case of many anxiety-related problems, people end up finding themselves in a toxic cycle.