Write about your worries before a high-stakes performance

Offload performance anxiety by writing it out in full immediately before the event.

Why it works

Worry and rumination consume working memory capacity — the same capacity that explicit monitoring draws on and that competes with automated performance. Expressive writing about worries "offloads" this content from active working memory into an external store, freeing the cognitive resources that would otherwise have been consumed by rumination during performance. Beilock’s lab demonstrated this directly in high-stakes math exam conditions.

How to do it

1. In the 10-15 minutes before a high-stakes event, write continuously about your specific worries: what you are afraid might happen, why it matters to you.
2. Write privately and without editing — do not try to make the worries sound rational or small.
3. Stop after 10 minutes regardless of whether the worries feel resolved.
4. Move into your pre-performance routine immediately after, treating the writing as the worry-processing step.

Evidence

Ramirez & Beilock (2011) showed in a randomized experiment that high school students who wrote about their test worries for 10 minutes before a high-stakes math exam significantly outperformed controls and matched their classroom performance, while controls showed performance drops. The effect was largest for the most worry-prone students. (rct)

Study is in academic testing contexts; generalization to sport and other performance domains is plausible but not directly tested. The 10-minute writing window is the experimentally tested condition.

Sources

• Ramirez & Beilock (2011), writing about testing worries boosts exam performance in the classroom, Science

Common mistake

Suppressing the worries instead of writing them out — suppression leaves them in working memory as active intrusive thoughts, exactly the reverse of the intended effect.