Chris's full story

My name is Chris, and I played baseball mainly in high school, where I pitched. My awful performance anxiety started in my junior year.  I never was an anxious person, to be honest, but in my junior year, I accidentally hit a batter in the face, and the first night after that was awful. It was the final game of the year, and I always shut myself down for a month after throwing. So I was forced to sit through all of these bad thoughts about pitching.

 

When I started throwing again it was really bad. It first started with the normal loss of control following a long break, but I could not correct it. I started really over thinking during the process. It's all muscle memory but the overthinking had severed the connection and it felt as though my arm wasn't connected to my brain. 

 

The worst part about it was the isolation and the constant thinking about it. Baseball has always been my escape from everything such as stress of school and life, so now when my only escape was causing me so much anxiety it really started to bring me down. 

 

When my senior year started, it was bad, really bad. The first practice, I hit two teammates during a bullpen and was visibly shaking while on the mound. I could not get out of my head. 

 

I looked up solutions and started to read about the yips and how several players have suffered from it. So I tried talking to my friends about it. But they just told me to keep it to myself as they thought it was weird for me to want to talk about my anxiety.

 

That caused the isolation to get even worse as there was no one I could even talk to about it who played the sport.
 

I asked the school if they had any resources, but they said they don't and that what I need doesn't seem like a big issue. 

 

So many athletes suffer from anxiety that impacts their performance, and until recently it was unheard of, but the more huge players speak out, the more hopeful I get that people will be able to feel more comfortable talking about it and snapping out of it or getting help.