How A List Helped Me Turn the Tables on Anxiety
A powerful change in perspective enabled me to finally overcome years of overthinking and crippling self-doubt.
Growing up, I was a very anxious kid who couldn’t deal with any sort of uncertainty.
Everything always had to be perfect, and if it wasn’t, my mind would launch itself into an endless spiral of overthinking and panic. I was so afraid of even the smallest of failures that I didn’t even try anything new for fun. The prospect of being even remotely inadequate at something was terrifying.
To protect myself, I chose to stay in my shell. There was always some justification for every opportunity that I chose to forego.
As you can imagine, such a mindset didn’t translate well into my professional tennis career. A friend once had this to say after one of our practice sessions:
“You get so nervous that sometimes it looks like you’ll die if you lose a point.”
And he was right, it did feel like that sometimes.
When I first started playing, I’d nerve up in matches. This was a pretty common thing, and it takes a while to adjust to the competitive environment. People usually ease into it with time.
However, this wasn’t the case for me.
The more matches I played, the more nervous I seemed to get. Everyone around me seemed to be handling the pressure, while I was constantly getting overwhelmed. In some matches, I would get so anxious that it felt like I had no control over my body.
I started to believe that I was somehow broken and that I’d never be as good as my peers. Even when I played well, I struggled to accept it. Nothing I ever did felt like it was good enough, no matter how hard I tried. This became a major part of my identity and how I perceived myself.
Every single day I longed for the ability to just switch off my mind.
It wasn’t just tennis that was affected. My whole life seemed to be dictated by my anxiety and tendency to overthink. It was exhausting to constantly feel like a failure and I was no longer motivated to do most things. My academic performance dipped, and my relationships with friends became strained.
It was an intensely isolating experience, and I could feel myself drifting away.
Fed up with all this, I decided to make huge changes to my lifestyle and training regimen. I followed a strict diet and ran myself ragged. I made an effort to do everything correctly, hoping that I’d finally be able to overcome the self-doubt I was drowning in. I believed that all this effort would help me feel more prepared, and hence less anxious.
But, that wasn’t the case.
All that effort just increased the pressure I felt while competing. Now I felt like I had to do justice to the colossal amount of time and energy I’d spent. I started getting anxiety attacks in matches when things weren’t going my way. It’d feel like someone was sitting on my chest and suffocating me.
I became even more afraid of competing and decided to stop playing matches altogether. I spent months in the safety of my comfort zone, whiling my time away in training.
Eventually, though, I had to compete again. I was mortified by the prospect of it but forced myself to travel to a tournament. I was seeded highly and drawn up against a guy who I had beaten several times before. This created an enormous amount of pressure on me to get through, as I was ‘expected’ to win.
The night before the match, I couldn’t get myself to sleep. I was overwhelmed by nerves and panic. That’s when I decided to try something new.
Instead of trying to resist my anxiety, I decided to let it in.
I realized that no matter how hard I tried, my nerves would not go away in time for the match. So for once, I decided to let go of my perfectionism, and adjust instead.
I took a piece of paper and wrote down every single way that my anxiety would affect my performance. I listed every worst-case scenario that came to mind. Then I proceeded to make a new game plan based around this list. I toned down the expectations I had for my level and opted for a much simpler, easy to execute strategy.
The next day, I was extremely tense when I stepped on the court. I was shaking and my legs felt heavy.
I had been expecting this.
I did my best to accept it and fell back to the simple strategy that I’d devised, focusing exclusively on executing it. I settled into the match and won it pretty easily.
This led to an important realization for me.
All this time, I’d been addressing everything that had been affected by my anxiety, rather than addressing the anxiety itself. I’d spent years being disgusted and frustrated by it, hopelessly trying to outrun it.
I made a similar list for every facet of my life. This helped me gain a better understanding of the various anxieties and doubts that punctuated my life.
I decided to respect the challenges I faced and made an effort to accommodate them rather than denying them.
A year on, I don’t have to make lists anymore. I have a much better understanding of myself and my emotions now. I still nerve up and get anxious, but I’ve realized that the key to getting through isn’t by resisting these feelings. I’ve understood that they are a part of me, and I’ve learned to make the best of what I have.
You can’t skirt around the problems you face. You have to address them and make the effort to go through them.
