Performance Anxiety

Summary

Abby Gold, a licensed marriage and family therapist (LMFT) who spent several years as clinical director of an eating disorder residential treatment program and now runs a private practice, joins Lisa Stone for a conversation on performance anxiety in junior tennis players. Gold defines performance anxiety as negative thoughts — conscious or unconscious — that impact how a person performs or shows up, distinguishes it from general anxiety, and maps how it manifests differently by age. She addresses the specific risk pathways that performance anxiety can open (disordered eating, OCD-adjacent ritualistic behavior, social withdrawal), explains when to escalate from observation to professional intervention, and demystifies what actually happens in therapy. The episode’s consistent message: performance anxiety is normal, non-linear, individualized, and treatable — it does not require failure to be present and does not limit itself to the sport in which it first appears.

Guest Background

Abby Gold is an LMFT in private practice who previously served as the clinical director of an eating disorder residential treatment program. She played tennis through high school. She does not specialize exclusively in sports psychology but brings clinical depth to the sports performance anxiety context through her eating disorder work, her CBT background, and her personal experience as a tennis player who engaged in the same pre-point rituals she discusses clinically. She is a personal friend of Lisa Stone and agreed to the episode specifically to help normalize the conversation around mental health support for junior athletes and their families.

Key Findings

1. Performance Anxiety Is Defined by Its Impact, Not Its Presence

Gold’s working definition: performance anxiety is negative thoughts — conscious or not — that impact how you perform or show up in a given situation. This is not the same as pre-competition nerves. Anxiety is energy; it exists on a spectrum from helpful (psyched-up, activated, ready) to maladaptive (spinning, debilitating, self-defeating). Performance anxiety can coexist with success — a player who is winning and ranking can still be experiencing performance anxiety if the negative internal narrative is shaping their decisions, their enjoyment, or their resilience after errors. The key line is not “are they anxious?” but “is this anxiety serving them or working against them?“

2. Age-Dependent Manifestations: Behavioral vs. Nuanced

In younger children (roughly under 10-11), performance anxiety shows up in observable, somatic, or behavioral ways: stomachaches, outbursts before practice, reluctance to attend, physical complaints with no clear cause. Younger children often lack the vocabulary and self-awareness to name what’s happening internally. In older children and adolescents, the manifestations become more nuanced and harder to detect: self-defeating internal monologue, social withdrawal, hyper-focus on sport as a way to manage anxiety about other areas of life, fear of success (not just failure), and what Gold calls the “search for security” — obsessive information-gathering (watching videos, reading match analysis) as an anxiety management strategy that mimics preparation.

3. The Risk Pathways: When Anxiety Becomes a Condition

Gold identifies three risk escalation patterns that parents and coaches should monitor:

Disordered eating as anxiety control: The mechanism is subtle. Performance anxiety about not performing well → pre-competition loss of appetite (common, benign) → player links not eating with good performance → eating restriction becomes a rule to control anxiety → can develop into full eating disorder if not interrupted. The danger is that coaches and parents often reinforce the intermediate steps (“You look great, you’re moving better”) without recognizing the driving anxiety. Gold notes this pathway is specifically elevated in female athletes where weight loss receives social reinforcement.

OCD-adjacent ritualism: Between-point rituals (bouncing the ball X times, pulling the hat, specific shorts adjustment) are taught in tennis from a young age and are legitimately performance-enhancing. They cross into problematic territory when the player cannot perform the shot without the ritual — when flexibility is gone. Gold’s test: can they do it without? If not, that is a signal worth examining.

Generalization: Performance anxiety does not stay in one domain. The internal narrative of “I’m not good enough” is not sport-specific. When it takes on sufficient energy, it replays in academic testing, social situations, relationships. Parents who observe anxious behaviors on the court should look at how the child is functioning at school and socially — and talk to teachers if something feels different.

4. The OCD Research Finding

Gold references research (source unspecified in the episode) finding that many elite athletes would technically meet diagnostic criteria for OCD based on their ritualistic behaviors — but the behaviors are not classified as disorder because they are performance-enhancing rather than performance-limiting. The tennis culture of training between-point rituals from a young age normalizes and systematizes behavior that in other contexts would flag as anxiety-related. The clinical takeaway: the line between trained ritual and anxiety-driven ritual is functional, not behavioral — what matters is whether the ritual is helping or whether the player has become dependent on it.

5. Warning Signs for Professional Escalation

Gold lists concrete behavioral flags that should prompt parents to consider professional support:

• Uncharacteristic changes in sleep, appetite (increase or decrease), social engagement
• Self-defeating thoughts becoming frequent or loud
• Excessive comparison to peers in a way that leaves the child visibly down on themselves
• Physical symptoms without medical cause (rigidity, increased injury frequency — anxiety-driven tension can contribute to muscle pulls and ankle rolls)
• Inability or unwillingness to discuss what’s going on
• The child’s behavior is concerning to the parent even after the child reports everything is fine — “trust your spidey sense”

Her key principle: “Risk it — risk being wrong. The worst that can happen is you apologize and repair. It’s harder to recover from feeling like you missed something.”

6. What Therapy Actually Looks Like

Gold demystifies the therapy process because parents and athletes often avoid seeking help due to fear of what will be uncovered. Her description: the process is solution-focused, self-driven, and individualized. The therapist first creates more space for honest conversation than is possible in a parent-child dynamic (children often protect parents from the full picture of their distress to avoid worrying them). Then an assessment gently maps symptoms against situations — the client often recognizes their own performance anxiety pattern through the questions being asked, which normalizes rather than pathologizes. Treatment is individualized: what bothers one person is not what bothers another, and the therapist does not impose a generic protocol.

7. Tennis as an Unusually High-Anxiety Sport by Structure

Gold and Lisa Stone agree that individual sports — and tennis specifically — create structurally elevated conditions for performance anxiety. Reasons named: no substitution (you cannot tap out when things get hard), direct spectator observation (parents, coaches, scouts, other players all watching), solo accountability for every point, the cumulative match format (a single bad moment can cascade through multiple games), and the uniquely public nature of errors in a sport where everyone watching can see each shot clearly. Team format, Gold implies, distributes the psychological weight of failure; individual format concentrates it entirely on one player.

Actionable Advice for Families

• Have regular baseline conversations with your child about how they’re feeling in and around tennis — not just when you notice a problem; the baseline relationship makes the problem conversations possible
• If you notice something feels different — not just that your child says something is wrong — trust that instinct and initiate a conversation, even if it means being wrong and apologizing; the cost of being wrong is low; the cost of not raising it can be high
• Consider calling the child’s teachers or school counselor if you’re seeing concerning behaviors on the court — performance anxiety routinely spreads to academic and social contexts and their teachers may be observing the same patterns in a different setting
• Intervention should match the child’s temperament: giving a perfectionist “homework” (workbooks, worksheets) to address anxiety can intensify the anxiety about not doing the homework well enough; the tool needs to fit the kid

INTENNSE Relevance

• Mental performance infrastructure: Gold’s framework — anxiety is energy, not pathology; the question is whether it’s serving or working against you — is the mental performance framework INTENNSE coaches should use in pre-bolt arc and between-arc coaching interactions; the goal is to activate, not suppress
• Team format as anxiety distribution: Gold explicitly notes that individual sports concentrate psychological pressure in ways that team formats do not; INTENNSE’s team structure is the structural answer to the individual sport anxiety problem she describes — losing a bolt arc contributes to team score but does not carry the same existential weight as losing a match alone
• Mic’d coaches: The between-bolt coaching window in INTENNSE is precisely the space Gold describes — a moment for a non-anxious presence to help a player regulate, reframe, and return to task; coaches trained in Gold’s model (observation, labeling thoughts, re-grounding) will use those 90 seconds more effectively than coaches who use them to correct technique
• Player recruitment: Gold’s point about the child protecting the parent from the full picture of their distress applies to the coach-player relationship in professional tennis as well; INTENNSE’s team coaching structure — where multiple staff observe a player across multiple sessions — is more likely to surface hidden anxiety than a single individual-path coach who sees a player once a week
• Development pipeline: The eating disorder risk pathway Gold describes (performance anxiety → appetite suppression → rule formation → disorder) is a specific clinical risk for elite junior female players; INTENNSE’s player welfare infrastructure should include access to clinicians like Gold as part of onboarding for players in the development pipeline
• Broadcast/storytelling: Gold’s demystification of therapy — “it’s not like you’re going to uncover a mountain of work to become a better human” — is a framing INTENNSE can use in player mental wellness content; normalizing mental health support for athletes is consistent with the league’s identity as a next-generation professional sports organization

Notable Quotes

“Performance anxiety is about the negative thoughts, conscious or not, that impact how you perform or show up in a given situation.”

“It can absolutely coexist with success. A player doesn’t have to be struggling or losing for performance anxiety to be there.”

“Anxiety is energy. And there’s helpful anxiety and there’s maladaptive anxiety. There’s a line that can be crossed.”

“If the child starts to link not eating with performing well, now it’s going to be a rule. A rule to control the anxiety.”

“A lot of athletes would be considered to have OCD based on their ritualistic behaviors — but we don’t label it that because it’s actually helping their performance.”

“Risk it — risk being wrong. The worst that can happen is you apologize and repair. It’s harder to recover from feeling like you missed something.”

“Tennis is a great outlet for most people — until it’s not, until it becomes an anxiety producer. So how do we get rid of what we don’t want there? Which is going to be different for everyone.”