Brainspotting for Performance Anxiety

Unlock Your Best Performance by Calming the Brain and Body

Performance anxiety can affect anyone, including athletes, professionals, students, and people navigating sexual or intimate relationships. Whether it shows up as stage fright, fear of public speaking, pressure at work, or anxiety on Zoom, the experience can feel overwhelming.

Your heart rate rises. Your mind blanks. Your body tightens.

Here’s the truth: performance anxiety is not a personal weakness. It’s a brain-body response. We use Brainspotting to help you access and process the deeper patterns driving that response so that you can perform with greater clarity, confidence, and presence.

Understanding the Yips: When the Body Overrides Performance

For many athletes and high performers, performance difficulties can show up in a very specific and frustrating way known as the yips. The yips are sudden, involuntary disruptions in skilled movements, such as a golfer struggling with a short putt, a baseball player suddenly becoming unable to throw accurately, or a musician losing fine motor control. Even though the person knows what to do, their body doesn’t cooperate.

Research on the yips suggests that they can involve a complex interaction between psychological and neurological factors. Researchers have described the yips occurring along a continuum between neurological focal dystonia and psychological choking under pressure. For some people, performance anxiety plays a significant role while for others neurological factors may be more prominent.

Whatever the underlying mechanism, pressure, fear of making another mistake, and heightened self-monitoring can intensify the experience and interfere with the automatic movements that normally happen without conscious thought.

In essence, something that once felt automatic can suddenly feel effortful, unpredictable, and outside your control.

What Is Brainspotting?

Brainspotting is a brain-body therapy that helps people access and process emotional and physiological responses connected to performance blocks. Instead of just talking about the problem, it helps you pay attention to the internal experiences and nervous system responses associated with it.

It is based on key principles:

• Emotional experiences can be felt and expressed through the body
• The nervous system plays an important role in our responses under pressure
• Working with both the mind and body can support deeper emotional processin

Why Performance Anxiety Happens

The Brain-Body Connection

Performance anxiety involves brain systems responsible for detecting and responding to perceived threat, including the amygdala and other parts of the nervous system.

These systems can:

• Respond rapidly to perceived threat
• Activate physical stress responses before you have time to consciously think about them
• Connect present-day experiences with emotionally significant memories and learned responses

That’s why you can think:
“I’m ready. I practiced.”

…but still feel:

• Tightness in your chest
• A shaky voice
• A racing heart
• Mental fog

You may logically know that you are prepared while your body is responding as though something is wrong.

How the Yips Fit Into the Brain-Body Response

For some people, anxiety and pressure appear to be important components of the yips. Instead of simply feeling anxious, the person may experience disruptions in coordination, timing, or automatic movement.

After a mistake or difficult performance, fear of repeating it can increase self-monitoring and tension. Movements that once happened automatically may become something the person consciously tries to control.

This is why trying harder, thinking more, or pushing through can sometimes intensify the problem.

The Problem With “Just Thinking Positive”

When anxiety is triggered, your attention and cognitive resources can become increasingly focused on threat, mistakes, and what might go wrong. Research on anxiety and performance shows that anxiety can affect attention, interpretation, physical execution, situation awareness and decision making under pressure. This can make it more difficult to access the fluid, automatic state that supports effective performance.

This is why insight or positive thinking alone may not be enough to resolve performance anxiety.

Learn how we can help you on your path of healing

Request a free 15 min consultation

The Brainspotting Difference: A Bottom-Up Approach

Brainspotting uses focused visual attention, body awareness, and therapeutic attunement to work with emotional and physiological activation associated with performance anxiety.

The process is designed to help you:

• Access emotional experiences
• Process stress responses connected to performance
• Develop a greater sense of regulation, safety, and contro

Brainspotting for the Yips

When anxiety, fear, or a distressing performance experience is contributing to the yips, Brainspotting can be used to explore and process those underlying emotional and physiological responses.

Instead of focusing exclusively on correcting the movement itself, Brainspotting allows you to work with what happens internally when you anticipate or attempt the movement: fear, tension, frustration, self-consciousness, or memories of previous mistakes.

As those responses become less intense, some people may find it easier to approach performance with less fear, self-monitoring, and overthinking.

Because the yips can also have neurological causes, persistent involuntary movements or significant motor symptoms should be appropriately evaluated rather than assumed to be caused solely by performance anxiety.

The Reflexive Response: What Your Therapist May Notice

During a session, therapists may notice subtle reflexive body responses, such as:

• Changes in eye movement or blinking
• Swallowing
• Deep sighs or breaths
• Twitching
• Changes in facial expression or posture

These responses can provide information about shifts occurring in your internal experience as you process the issue.

How Brainspotting Works

A Step-by-Step Experience

1. Select the Issue You Want to Focus On

You begin by choosing something you want to work on.

This could be:

• Stage fright or public speaking anxiety
• Sports or performance pressure
• Specific performance breakdowns such as the yips or difficulty accessing fine motor skills under pressure
• Stress around work or Zoom meetings
• Sexual performance concerns
• A past experience that still affects your confidence

You don’t need to go into every detail—just enough to bring the issue gently into awareness.

2. Tune Into Your Body

Next, you connect with how this issue shows up in your body.

You might notice:

• Tightness in your chest
• Butterflies in your stomach
• Tension in your jaw or shoulders
• A sense of heaviness or contraction
• Stiffness or jerking movements

This is important because performance anxiety is often experienced physically as well as emotionally. Your body can provide important information about how you are responding to the issue.

3. Identify the Brainspot

With your therapist’s guidance, you slowly scan your visual field from left to right or right to left.

You are looking for the spot where:

• The feeling becomes stronger
• Your body reacts more
• You feel a deeper connection to the issue

This is your brainspot, a point in your visual field that feels particularly connected to the internal experience you are working with.

4. Just Stay With It: You Don’t Need to Do Anything

Once you find your brainspot, you simply:

• Keep your eyes on the spot
• Stay aware of your body and internal experience

You don’t have to:

• Talk
• Analyze
• Try to fix anything

Instead, you allow whatever thoughts, feelings, memories, or body sensations arise to unfold without forcing the process.

5. Co-Regulate and Feel Supported

Your therapist stays present and attuned to you throughout the session.

They may notice small shifts such as:

• A deep sigh
• Subtle movements
• Changes in your breathing
• Muscle relaxation

These shifts may accompany changes in your internal experience as the session unfolds. You’re not doing this alone; you are supported the entire time.

6. What Can You Expect?

Experiences vary from person to person. Some people report:

• A sense of calm or relief
• Feeling more grounded in their body
• Less intensity around the performance issue
• A different emotional response when they think about the situation

Over time, the goal of the work is to help you:

• Feel more confident
• Stay present under pressure
• Perform with greater ease and clarity
• Access more natural, automatic performance without as much overthinkin

Learn how we can help you on your path of healing

Request a free 15 min consultation

Brainspotting for Different Types of Performance Anxiety

Stage Fright & Public Speaking

Common challenges:

• Fear of judgment
• Forgetting what to say
• Avoiding visibility

Brainspotting can help you work with the fear and body activation that arise when you are being seen, evaluated, or asked to perform in front of others.

Sports Performance Anxiety

Common challenges:

• Overthinking
• Fear of mistakes
• Loss of confidence
• Difficulty recovering after a poor performance or mistake

Brainspotting can help athletes work with anxiety, self-doubt, and emotional responses that interfere with focus and natural performance.

Job Performance & Workplace Pressure

Common challenges:

• Imposter syndrome
• Fear of failure
• Difficulty speaking up
• Anxiety about presentations, leadership, or being evaluated

Brainspotting can help address the underlying anxiety that makes it difficult to think clearly, speak confidently, or remain grounded under professional pressure.

Zoom & Virtual Performance Anxiety

Virtual environments can create their own forms of performance stress, including:

• Seeing yourself constantly
• Limited nonverbal feedback
• Feeling exposed
• Becoming overly aware of how you look or sound on camera

Simple Strategies

• Take slow, deep breaths before meetings
• Soften your gaze
• Ground your body
• Hide your self-view when possible if watching yourself increases anxiety
• Use grounding or Brainspotting tools you have developed with your therapist

Sexual Performance Anxiety

Common challenges:

• Pressure to perform
• Fear of not being enough
• Disconnection from the body
• Becoming focused on performance rather than connection

Brainspotting can help you work with experiences such as:

• Shame
• Fear
• Anxiety
• Stored tension

Reducing the intensity of these responses can make more room for presence, safety, and connection.

Target Outcomes: What You May Experience

Short-Term vs. Long-Term Changes

After a Session, Some People May Feel:

• Calmer and more grounded
• Less overwhelmed
• Less activated when thinking about the performance situation

Over Time, Goals May Include:

• Reduced reactivity to performance triggers
• Increased confidence
• Better ability to remain present under pressure
• Less overthinking and self-monitoring

A Wider Window of Tolerance

Your window of tolerance refers to the range in which you can remain emotionally regulated and present even when experiencing stress.

As your capacity for regulation grows, you may be better able to:

• Stay present in high-pressure moments
• Think clearly
• Respond instead of reac

Physical Changes

As you become more regulated, you may also notice physical changes such as:

• Less jaw clenching
• Deeper breathing
• Less muscle tension
• A greater ability to relax before or after stressful situation

Frequently Asked Questions

You don’t have to push through performance anxiety alone.

Brainspotting offers a brain-body approach for exploring and processing the emotional patterns that may be keeping you from accessing the confidence, presence, and ability you already have.

Contact us to learn more about Brainspotting for performance anxiety and whether it may be a good fit for you.

Learn how we can help you on your path of healing

Request a free 15 min consultation

Phone/Fax: (619) 819-6841

Email: contact@authenticityassociates.com

Our office is located in Carlsbad, CA 92009

We also do nationwide sessions via Zoom and FaceTime.

Please contact us for an appointment.