After 15 years in sport psychology, the biggest performance killer I see isn’t weak mental skills — it’s the war athletes wage against their own inner experience.
Trent Claypool, PsyD· 5 min read
You’re standing over your bike. Or sitting in the dugout waiting for your at-bat. Or lacing up before the biggest match of your season. Your heart is hammering. Your stomach is tight. And every piece of mental performance advice you’ve ever received is screaming the same thing:
Control it. Push through it. Don’t let it get to you.
So you try. You clamp down. You fight the feeling. And the harder you fight, the worse it gets.
Here’s what 15 years of clinical work with athletes — from age-group competitors to professionals — has taught me: the athletes who perform best under pressure aren’t the ones who’ve conquered their emotions. They’re the ones who’ve stopped trying to.
I call this shift the willingness turn — the moment an athlete stops fighting their inner experience and starts competing alongside it. And it changes everything.
Why Emotional Suppression Backfires Under Pressure
Most traditional mental performance training treats emotions like malfunctions. Nervous before a race? Fix it. Frustrated after a bad play? Shut it down. Anxious about nationals?
Push through. Overcome.
The underlying message: feelings are problems to solve.
But psychologist Daniel Wegner’s research on ironic process theory revealed something that changed sport psychology forever. When people try to suppress a thought, they experience it more frequently — and the effect intensifies under cognitive load (Wegner, 1994). Competition is pure cognitive load. So the athlete trying to “not be nervous” before the biggest moment of their season is running directly into a psychological wall.
It gets worse. Gross (2015) found that suppression — the default strategy for most athletes — doesn’t actually reduce what you feel internally. It only masks the outward expression. Inside, the emotion keeps firing. And the act of suppression drains cognitive resources that could otherwise go toward executing your skills.
The strategy most athletes are taught for managing emotions actively steals mental bandwidth from performance.
Gross and Levenson (1997) drove this home at the physiological level. Suppressing emotional expression doesn’t calm the body — it increases arousal. Heart rate goes up. Skin conductance rises. Sympathetic activation intensifies. Your nervous system doesn’t care that you’ve decided to “be tough.” It’s still fully activated. You’ve just added a second job on top of competing.
What Changes When You Stop Fighting Yourself
Traditional and acceptance-based approaches start from fundamentally different assumptions about what feelings are:
| Control Model (Traditional) | Willingness Model (ACT-Based) | |
|---|---|---|
| Core belief | Emotions are obstacles to performance | Emotions are natural responses to meaningful moments |
| Goal | Reduce or eliminate unwanted feelings | Perform effectively with whatever you’re feeling |
| Relationship | Adversarial — feelings are opponents | Open — feelings are information |
| Strategy | Suppress, replace, override | Notice, allow, refocus on action |
| Under pressure | Breaks down as cognitive load increases | Holds up — willingness requires no cognitive resources |
| Metaphor | Feelings are problems to solve | Feelings are weather to move through |
This isn’t a subtle distinction. It’s a completely different relationship with your inner life as an athlete.
You Don’t Need to Feel Good to Perform Well
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) offers a framework that flips the traditional script. Instead of targeting emotional content — trying to change what you feel — ACT targets your relationship to what you feel (Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 2012).
The core concept is psychological flexibility: the ability to be present with difficult internal experiences while continuing to move toward what matters. You can feel nervous and still execute. You can feel doubt and still compete with intention.
Gardner and Moore brought these principles directly into sport through their Mindfulness-Acceptance-Commitment (MAC) approach. Their research found that MAC produced equal or superior performance outcomes compared to traditional Psychological Skills Training, with one critical difference: MAC athletes didn’t need to feel good to perform well (Gardner & Moore, 2007; Moore, 2009).
I see this in my own practice constantly. I worked with a college athlete who spent two years trying to “get her nerves under control” before competitions — visualization scripts, breathing routines, positive self-talk, the whole traditional toolkit. Nothing stuck. It wasn’t until she stopped trying to change her emotional state and started learning to act with it that her performance unlocked. She didn’t feel less nervous. She just stopped needing to.
That distinction matters. Traditional approaches teach athletes they need to achieve a certain emotional state before they can perform. The acceptance-based approach teaches that performance and emotional state are separate channels — you can turn up one without adjusting the other.
A 2009 study by Schwanhausser worked with a teenage competitive diver using a mindfulness and acceptance approach. The results? Better performance and more flow experiences — but here’s the key: their anxiety levels didn’t actually go down. Instead, the athlete learned to change their relationship with the anxiety.
A 2012 research review by Birrer, Röthlin, and Morgan backed this up, emphasizing that mindfulness and acceptance work not because they eliminate uncomfortable feelings, but because they teach athletes a different way to engage with those feelings. It’s about the process of how you relate to anxiety, not the content of the anxiety itself.
The Emotional Control Trap — and the Way Out
Here’s the pattern I see with athletes again and again, consistent with what Kashdan and Rottenberg (2010) found in their research on psychological flexibility and wellbeing:
The Control Trap:
Feel anxiety → Interpret it as a threat → Try to suppress it → Suppression backfires → Anxiety increases → Now feel anxious about being anxious → Performance suffers → Conclude you need more control next time → Repeat
ACT researchers call this experiential avoidance — the attempt to avoid, suppress, or change unwanted internal experiences. It’s one of the most robust predictors of psychological dysfunction across clinical populations (Hayes et al., 2006). And it’s essentially what we teach athletes when we tell them to “conquer” their nerves.
The alternative isn’t passivity. It’s the willingness turn:
The Willingness Alternative:
Feel anxiety → Recognize it as a natural response to something that matters → Make room for it without fighting → Redirect attention to values-driven action → Cognitive resources stay available → Perform from presence rather than resistance
This is what I mean when I say feelings are experiences to encounter, not problems to solve. When you stop treating emotions as enemies to defeat and start experiencing them as passing, subjective, and fundamentally yours — you stop performing despite your feelings and start performing alongside them.
What This Sounds Like in Practice
Control mindset: “I need to calm down before I can race well.”
Willingness mindset: “My body is activated because this matters. I can race with this energy.”
Control mindset: “I shouldn’t be thinking about the last play.”
Willingness mindset: “There’s the replay thought again. I see it. Back to what’s in front of me.”
Control mindset: “Why can’t I just be confident?”
Willingness mindset: “Confidence would be nice, but I don’t need it to execute what I’ve trained.“
Control mindset: “Something is wrong with me for feeling this way.”
Willingness mindset: “This is what it feels like to care. I can compete with this.”
The athletes who make this shift don’t suddenly stop feeling nervous or doubtful. They stop needing to. And paradoxically, that’s often when the intensity naturally decreases — because the feeling is no longer amplified by the struggle to eliminate it.
⚡ Try this before your next competition
When the nerves arrive, instead of trying to make them go away, silently name what you notice — racing heart, tight stomach, busy mind — then ask yourself one question: What action matters right now? That’s the willingness turn in thirty seconds. Notice, name, refocus.
A Note on What This Isn’t
This isn’t an argument against all emotional regulation. There are moments — after a traumatic event, in the middle of a panic episode, during a genuine crisis — where stabilization matters. The distinction is between regulation as a foundation and suppression as a performance strategy. When your nervous system is regulated enough to stay present with discomfort, you don’t need to suppress. You can let the feeling be there while you compete. That’s the difference.
When negative self-talk takes hold, the answer isn’t to fight harder — it’s to soften, notice, and re-engage with what matters. And your beliefs about performance shift when you stop making your emotional life a battlefield.
The Bottom Line for Athletes, Coaches, and Parents
Your feelings aren’t blocking your performance. Your war with your feelings is.
Suppression costs cognitive resources, amplifies what you’re trying to eliminate, and creates a secondary layer of distress. The research consistently shows that athletes can perform at their best without first achieving any particular emotional state.
For coaches and parents: the most helpful thing you can say to a nervous athlete isn’t “just relax” or “calm down” — it’s “It makes sense that you feel this way. You can compete with this.” That single reframe does more than a hundred positive affirmations.
The most important mental skill isn’t control. It’s willingness — the capacity to have your experience fully, without defense, while doing what matters on the field, court, track, or pool. Your emotions aren’t defects. They’re proof you’re in the arena and it matters to you. The athletes who learn to compete with that — rather than against it — don’t just perform better. They stay in the game longer, burn out less, and find the kind of freedom that control could never give them.
If you’re ready to stop fighting yourself and start competing from a different place, explore how we work with competition anxiety at Summit Sport Psychology — or learn about biofeedback-based nervous system training that builds the regulation foundation the willingness turn depends on.
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🚀 Coming soon: The Performance Freedom Protocol — a comprehensive mental training system built on ACT, nervous system science, and 15 years of work with competitive athletes.
References
Birrer, D., Röthlin, P., & Morgan, G. (2012). Mindfulness to enhance athletic performance: Theoretical considerations and possible impact mechanisms. Mindfulness, 3(3), 235–246.
Gardner, F. L., & Moore, Z. E. (2007). The psychology of enhancing human performance: The Mindfulness-Acceptance-Commitment (MAC) approach. Springer.
Gross, J. J. (2015). Emotion regulation: Current status and future prospects. Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 1–26.
Gross, J. J., & Levenson, R. W. (1997). Hiding feelings: The acute effects of inhibiting negative and positive emotion. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 106(1), 95–103.
Hayes, S. C., Luoma, J. B., Bond, F. W., Masuda, A., & Lillis, J. (2006). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Model, processes, and outcomes. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44(1), 1–25.
Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The process and practice of mindful change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Kashdan, T. B., & Rottenberg, J. (2010). Psychological flexibility as a fundamental aspect of health. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(7), 865–878.
Moore, Z. E. (2009). Theoretical and empirical developments of the Mindfulness-Acceptance-Commitment (MAC) approach to performance enhancement. Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology, 3(4), 291–302.
Schwanhausser, L. (2009). Application of the Mindfulness-Acceptance-Commitment (MAC) protocol with an adolescent springboard diver. Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology, 3(4), 377–395.
Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control. Psychological Review, 101(1), 34–52.