Why do we choke under pressure?

The siren has sounded. The scores are even. A footy player has one final chance to kick an easy goal to get his team into the finals. He's right in front of the goals. He lines up. Kicks. Misses. The pressure of such a moment was phenomenal, and the player choked under it. So what happens in the brain during such intense periods? Why can some people remain calm while others can't handle it? This episode first aired in July 2024. Guests: Caroline AndersonPerformance psychologistLead psychologist for the Paris 2024 Australian Olympic Team Dr Chris MesagnoSenior lecturer in sport and exercise psychology, Victoria University Louise PotterFootballer and Darebin Falcons legend Mary SpillaneClinical psychologist Credits: Presenter: Sana QadarReporter/Producer: Belinda SmithProducer: Rose Kerr, Petria LadgroveSound engineer: Russell StapletonTo view the transcript for this episode, head to its original webpage https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/allinthemind/why-do-athletes-choke-under-pressure/104011882. You can catch up on more episodes of the All in the Mind podcast with journalist and presenter Sana Qadar, exploring the psychology of topics like stress, memory, communication and relationships on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:33Speaker 02

  Hey, it's Sana Qadar here. As the 2026 Winter Olympics come to a close, we wanted to revisit an episode from our archives about something familiar to many elite athletes. It's choking under pressure. I hope you enjoy the episode. Here it is now.

• 0:51Speaker 03

  I used to get nervous for various competitions and events, but nothing does quite compare to that moment of walking out to the Olympics.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  It's the 2004 Athens Olympics and Caroline Bardasek is stepping into the stadium for her first match.

• 1:06Speaker 03

  There's of course an amazing excitement and thrill of it, but I also had this absolute sense of impending doom and dread, you know, heart racing, yeah, nausea.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Her sport is taekwondo and she's representing Australia in the women's welterweight division.

• 1:22Speaker 03

  I was in an individual sport and walking out there can feel incredibly lonely place, you know, you know that it's up to you, there's no one else there, you know the spotlight's on you. So it can definitely feel really that sense of isolation and loneliness. There's definitely the excitement of the roar of the crowd and, you know, knowing that my family and loved ones were, you know, I definitely had people come over and travel to watch.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  It would be Caroline's only Olympic fight. She lost to Guatemala's Heidi Juarez, who would end up finishing fourth overall. Still, 20 years on, Caroline recalls that electrifying atmosphere in the stadium.

• 2:01Speaker 03

  There was a specialness about it as well and a beauty there, but absolutely an intensity like nothing else.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  But this can be a double edged sword.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  I feel like there's times when that helps you lift and rise in that moment and helps harness focus and attention. And then other times, and I think I probably felt both of these in my match, when it can lead to sort of almost feeling a bit overwhelmed and panicked for sure.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  These days, Caroline, now Caroline Anderson, is the lead psychologist for the 2024 Australian Olympic team. Part of her job is to help athletes perform in that beautiful intensity of the world stage. For many, this will be the pinnacle of their sporting career. So how does she make sure they don't crumble under all that pressure? That they don't choke?

• 2:55Speaker 02

  Hi there, I'm Sana Qadar and this is All in the Mind. And in the studio with me today is ABC Science reporter Belinda Smith. Hey Belle.

• 3:03Speaker 04

  Hello Sana.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Have you ever choked under pressure? I have to ask.

• 3:08Speaker 04

  Oh, look, I have, I think most people would have. You know, the term choking is almost always used in sport. But people choke in everyday life. I remember one time I was in school and I had to recite a poem in front of everyone at assembly.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 3:22Speaker 04

  I knew it, I'd practised it a million times before. But I looked at the front and I could see my grandma sitting there with a copy of the poem in her hand.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 3:30Speaker 04

  And I just froze. And all the words disappeared from my brain and I couldn't say a word.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 3:37Speaker 04

  You know, I was, I was maybe 10 years old and that has stuck with me.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  That's terrifying. I feel like I've had nightmares like that. I haven't had actual experiences like that, but nightmares where that happens. And so what got you thinking about this topic?

• 3:50Speaker 04

  Well, the inspiration came from the footy field.

• 3:57Speaker 04

  I play Aussie Rules football and in a match a couple of years ago, one of my teammates, Louise, just could not kick a goal. And she's our full forward, like it's our job to get the ball to her. So then she would kick a goal. And normally, four out of five times, she would. Most seasons, she'll kick the most goals of anyone in the league. So, yeah, it's her thing. But not this game.

• 4:22Speaker 05

  And very easy shots too, like not far out, not on bad angles. Pretty much expected shots. And I think I'd missed two and then I was sort of, the next one, I was like, oh gee. And I think I started to think about it too much. Like what, what did I do wrong previously? Or, you know, am I doing the same as what I did before? Why is this not working?

• 4:46Speaker 04

  I could see Lou getting more and more frustrated. And this ramped up as the game wore on. That day, she kicked something like six or seven points, but no goals. Look, in the end, we won anyway, so it didn't actually have any bearing on the outcome. But the memory is still pretty fresh, a whole year later.

• 5:06Speaker 05

  Nearly 200 games of football I've played. I can remember that day in particular.

• 5:13Speaker 04

  Sporting history is littered with examples of people who, at the top of their game, just suddenly and completely lost it under pressure. For instance...

• 5:24Speaker 06

  Well, you've no doubt heard that Greg Norman today failed by five strokes to win the coveted US Masters Golf Championship at Augusta in Georgia. And so, for the fifth time, golf's greatest prize has eluded the great white shark. But according to noted sports psychologist Dr Noel Blundell, Greg Norman could and should have won today. And the reason he didn't lies within Greg Norman himself.

• 5:47Speaker 07

  Unfortunately, it's happened quite a number of times with Greg when he's been in contention, when he's led majors into the final round. This is a scenario that has occurred, unfortunately, quite a number of times.

• 5:58Speaker 04

  Chris Massanio from Victoria University did his PhD on choking interventions. And he told me that there are three components to a classic choke.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  So when choking under pressure occurs, the person must experience or have an increase in anxiety from what is normal. So, normal as in what do you feel when you're practising? Most of the time, people don't feel much anxiety at all when they're practising because there's really nothing, not much importance on it.

• 6:26Speaker 04

  Right, the stakes aren't high.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, researchers would agree that anxiety has to increase at some point to lead to decreases in performance, which is the second element that needs to occur.

• 6:38Speaker 04

  And the third part is?

• 6:40Speaker 00

  There has to be skilled performance. So, if I'm a novice, most researchers would argue that novices have too much of a fluctuation in performance levels to really have a choking experience.

• 6:54Speaker 04

  So, for Lou, my teammate, she's past that novice level and well into skilled performance. You know, it's automatic and fluid. When she kicks for goal, the action is so natural, she doesn't even think about it. She just points her body in the direction and boots the ball. But it's important to note that pretty much everyone chokes at some point. It's a common reason that athletes will see Mary Spillane. She's a clinical psychologist who mostly works with elite sports people and coaches. And she's worked with all sorts, you know, footballers, tennis players, cricketers. And they all choke.

• 7:30Speaker 05

  And it's something that's so, so distressing and upsetting for an athlete when it does happen. Almost worse than losing in many instances. And that the backlash that an athlete can receive if they have been perceived as choking can be really sort of harsh and critical.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  That is so rough. Why does this happen? Like, is there a way to minimise it?

• 7:55Speaker 04

  Well, if we look at the world of research, there's sort of two main ideas for why people choke. And the first is called self-focus or paralysis by analysis. This is what Dr Chris Massanio told me.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  You know, in golf as an example, they analyse their swing too much. They try to be perfect and that tends to override the most powerful computer in the world, which is your brain. And if something is automatic, you should let it be automatic in that context. So people that choke or experience choking via the self-focus model, they tend to turn inward and they just over-analise things.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  So it sounds like that's what was going on in Lou's mind, right?

• 8:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And then there's your basic distractions.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  There's a distraction model that indicates that people just get either internally distracted, maybe by the feelings that they're having, the anxiety that they're experiencing, the potential shaking that they're having as a result of anxiety increase. Or it could be an external thing. Maybe it's the man on the mark in the AFL just being distracted by him or her. Or it could be the crowd noise or the crowd themselves generally.

• 9:06Speaker 04

  See, that's me. I get distracted so easily that I just lose focus on whatever it is in front of me. How about you, Sana?

• 9:14Speaker 02

  I am the opposite. I'm an over thinker, so I focus too intensely on what I'm meant to be doing and then I Freak myself out.

• 9:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. How interesting, we've got one of each.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:23Speaker 04

  So, look, that's the world of research. And if we go from there into the clinic, psychologist Mary Spillane, she sees a few common qualities in athletes who experience choking.

• 9:35Speaker 05

  Certainly those athletes who are quite self-conscious. So these are people who are quite preoccupied with how they're playing or their perception of how others think they're playing. Athletes who are quite perfectionistic, so they have really unrealistic high expectations for themselves and how they need to perform. Individuals who are anxious and have a tendency to overthink things can be quite susceptible. But also athletes who have a really strong athletic identity. These are individuals whose ability to perform and perform well and be an athlete are strongly linked to who they are as a person and how they see themselves as a person.

• 10:13Speaker 04

  So if we go to Lou, this rings true.

• 10:16Speaker 05

  For a long period of time, it was a lot of my identity. It was something I was really proud of doing. Well, when I go out to play, even now, I feel that that's an expectation upon me. And that's something, not that other people put on me necessarily, but that's something that I expect from myself.

• 10:35Speaker 04

  Then, of course, there's all the other stuff going on in an athlete's life. Here's Mary Spillane.

• 10:42Speaker 05

  And I think a really important factor and one that I'm quite passionate about is mental health and wellbeing. So if an athlete has stresses going on in their personal life or mental health concerns in their personal life, then they don't have a lot of psychological resources left to be able to perform under pressure.

• 11:02Speaker 04

  That's a biggie. Athletes aren't superhuman and some do have existing mental health issues that can influence how they perform. And the act of underperforming or choking can in turn affect an athlete's mental health. It's something Chris is looking into now.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  We're doing some studies at the moment, trying to focus on the mental health side of things with individuals who actually experienced choking. And this comes on the back of an honour student, Matt Goodyear.

• 11:31Speaker 04

  Collingwood supporters might recognise the name. Matt played a couple of matches for the Pies in 2016.

• 11:37Speaker 00

  Not strange to me, but we're finding that people who actually experienced choking struggle from a mental health standpoint. If you can believe it, in our anonymous survey, 7% of athletes who actually experienced choking had suicidal thoughts.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Whoa.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  7%. And we broke that down into low level athletes, so your recreational club level versus your high level athletes. And we found that 10% of those high level athletes were the ones that actually experienced suicidal thoughts.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  That is incredible. That sounds huge.

• 12:11Speaker 04

  I know, right. But, you know, just to be clear here, this is a self-reported survey of around 130 athletes. And we don't know what the respondents' mental health or personal circumstances were before they choked. But, you know, it's still a fair chunk of people.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:27Speaker 04

  And Chris thinks that this is at least partly explained by the shame associated with choking. So Chris says psychological help and support services for people who choke is super important. And the survey also found around 17% of respondents thought about quitting their sport altogether, all because they couldn't perform under pressure, maybe choking just once.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  Wow. Okay, so it seems choking can potentially be bad, not only from a performance perspective, but also from a participation in mental health perspective?

• 12:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  So how do psychologists help athletes get out of that downward spiral of underperformance?

• 13:05Speaker 04

  Ideally, you want to reduce or get rid of whatever's getting in the way, so the athlete can let their body do what they've practised or done a million times before. Psychologist Mary Spillane says that what we see, watching from the crowd or on TV, is never the whole story of what we would call a choke.

• 13:24Speaker 05

  Often when we're a spectator and we're watching sport, you might see the golfer miss the putt. But what you're actually seeing is the outcome of the choking, whereas actually there's a whole heap of events, mental events, that are going on in the lead up to that. And so it's really important that you understand, or that we understand, what was going on for you, how were you thinking and feeling and behaving?

• 13:44Speaker 04

  Also important is understanding what good performance looks like. And getting this out of an athlete can be easier said than done.

• 13:55Speaker 05

  And interestingly, when you ask athletes to tell you about a poor performance, they can reel it off straight away and tell you about all the things that they did wrong. But when you say, well, what does good performance look like? They have difficulty sometimes articulating in detail what that looked like. And so when an athlete says, I want to stop underperforming, I want to play better, I want to stop making mistakes. I'll say, okay, so we want to step out of that. But what are you stepping into?

• 14:21Speaker 04

  So it's not really enough to put bad performance in the rear view mirror if you don't know where it is you want to go, right? So you need to have a destination and Mary's job is to get you on that path. The thing is, mistakes will happen. We can't completely eliminate them. We can't perform perfectly all the time. But what we can do is reduce the odds of mistakes happening. And when they do, move on quickly. So in the lead up to a game, Mary will talk to athletes about coping ahead, which lowers stress and pressure ahead of time.

• 14:55Speaker 05

  So that could be that you're thinking about a key moment in a game that might come up and you're actually practising going through that in your mind, using a strategy like visualisation and practising it over and over again. And even thinking about the situations in a game where you might make a mistake, all the things that you're worried about doing, and thinking about how you'll cope with those ahead of time. So that when you get into a game, you've thought about these things, you've managed these things over and over in your mind and therefore they're not as stressful or overwhelming when they do happen. So that lead up is really important.

• 15:32Speaker 04

  These kinds of coping ahead plans are used in therapies like dialectical behaviour therapy, which is designed to help people control their emotions. Emotional regulation is of course important during a match too. We can lower stress to a manageable level by focusing on breathing and mindfulness. Refocus attention to the here and now.

• 15:56Speaker 05

  Depending on the sport, where you use those techniques might vary. If it's cricket, it might be between balls. If it's footy, it might be between goals. Golf, between shots. And having a really clear and repeated routine around breathing and coming back to those key focuses as a way of managing.

• 16:16Speaker 04

  If you're distractible, like I am, pre-shot or pre-performance routines might help. You can't be fully present for a full game of football, but we can have moments where we mentally anchor ourselves. So that might be pulling up your socks or bouncing a ball a certain number of times, even just taking a deep breath, deliberate actions. Here's Chris Musaño.

• 16:38Speaker 00

  If you focus on those steps, kind of like a checklist on a shopping list, you tick those boxes off and actually focus your attention on that shopping list, if you will, then you're more likely to execute the shot.

• 16:53Speaker 04

  Only to an extent though. You don't want to get into superstition territory and pin everything on your routine because what if you don't have time to run through your checklist?

• 17:04Speaker 04

  If you suffer from paralysis by analysis, you might try to get your brain thinking about anything but your technique. Keep those analytical bits of your brain busy. It's like giving a child a job to do so they're out of the way. Something like counting backwards from 100 by 7 might be enough to divert your brain's attention from what your body's doing and let your body complete its action, whether that's a kick or putt or hit, like it has 1,000 times before. And then there's the quiet eye, which sounds like a lovely nap, right? But...

• 17:39Speaker 00

  It's about eye tracking. So if you can focus, for example, in a golf shot, if you focus on the dimples of the golf ball for longer when you're actually hitting a putt, then you're more likely to improve performance than if you didn't have a longer fixation on that golf ball.

• 17:58Speaker 04

  It sounds too simple, but it can help prevent choking, especially at times of high pressure. And exactly where you look changes for different sports. So for golf, it's on the ball. If you have a free throw in basketball, you fixate on the front of the hoop. If you're taking a soccer penalty, you look at the top left or top right corner of the net. But the key is to not only fixate your vision on a particular point, but hold that laser focus even after you've gone through the motion of hitting or throwing or kicking a ball, just to make sure you eliminate all distractions until the motion is complete.

• 18:43Speaker 04

  Then there are things you can do after a match. No one likes to think about low points in their life, whether that be in their sport or whatever, but psychologist Mary Spillane says it can be helpful for athletes to mentally ask some post-match questions. How do they go, what things went well, what things didn't go so well? And then how can we work on those things that didn't go so well for next time? So it's quite sort of analytical and really looking at just understanding things that we can improve. And some people find that really helpful to be able to go through things in that way. So that when you're in that situation again, and you you might have a similar experience or you might be in a similar position, you can sort of say to yourself, okay, I've been

• 19:25Speaker 04

  here before, I know what to do, rather than, oh gosh, I've been here before and I didn't cope well and now I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do to get out of this one. So it just provides a, you know, an increased sense of control.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Those questions, they they sound like the ones that reporters ask athletes after a match, like it's the same set of questions after every match.

• 19:46Speaker 04

  That's exactly right, yeah.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  And it's so much more awkward having to answer those in public.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't know. I think answering them in your head's not, you know, the most comfortable experience either, but I know what you mean.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Maybe the whole thing is terrible, no matter how you cut it. Um, okay, what other kinds of tools do psychologists use?

• 20:03Speaker 04

  Oh, there are heaps. Carolyn Anderson, the Australian Olympic team's lead psychologist, she uses an approach called acceptance and commitment therapy. It can be used in, you know, tons of scenarios from treating mental health conditions to helping high-flying corporate folk do their jobs, or of course, athletes.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  The kinds of skills are really about understanding our emotions, why we have them. And then it's not about changing those emotions. It's about how do we create room and actually expand around them to help us rather than hinder us. And rather than, again, trying to somehow have positive thoughts or change our thoughts. It's just we change our relationship to our thinking.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  And so how does this relate to sports performance?

• 20:47Speaker 04

  Well, most people, including elite athletes, get that little voice in their head that says things like,

• 20:53Speaker 03

  what are people thinking about me? Or what's going to happen? Or maybe I'm just not good enough. Like those, they're quite universal things that we all have. And the more that we normalise that, we just tend to probably dwell and worry less about it.

• 21:07Speaker 04

  This approach also lets us rethink the symptoms of anxiety and stress we get when we're under pressure and reframe them in a really beneficial way, not a bad way. So Sana, when you get nervous, what do you feel in your body?

• 21:21Speaker 02

  Oh God, I feel super tense. My back feels incredibly stiff. My stomach hurts, my chest is a bit tight, all the bad stuff.

• 21:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, right. Look, generally it doesn't feel good, huh?

• 21:32Speaker 02

  No.

• 21:34Speaker 04

  And look, you know, I get, you know, I can feel my heart thumping in my rib cage and I can almost hear the blood whooshing in my ears and I feel really sick.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:43Speaker 04

  Pretty common, right? But if we don't understand why, you know, our heart thumps like that or why we feel like we're going to have a little spew, that can go on and cause more stress and anxiety and less control and our thoughts spiral. And well, that's your recipe for choking.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  Whereas if we understand why our body is doing this, this is a natural thing that our body does to protect us, just like in a type of fight or flight, but is also actually going to enhance and help performance. So our heart pumping blood is actually a good thing because it's getting blood to the major muscle groups where we want it. Feeling nauseous is just our digestive system switching off to try to save energy.

• 22:20Speaker 04

  A really powerful part of this kind of therapy, Caroline says, is focusing on values and purpose.

• 22:27Speaker 03

  You know, if we're a stay at home parent, if we're an elite athlete, if we're in the military, focusing on why and purpose and the values that really are deep down important to us becomes a really powerful intervention and tool. And that does tend to help us navigate through life's challenges, no matter what we're doing.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Hey, this is All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar and we've been hearing about how athletes who choke under pressure can get out of that vicious cycle of anxiety and underperforming, and how they can prevent it from happening again. In the studio with me is science reporter Belinda Smith. And Belle, let's talk about confidence, because when I think about elite athletes or sportspeople, I picture someone with real swagger, right? Like, they're not generally meek, they're not going to be creeping from the change room into the stadium. So how important is confidence when it comes to performing or underperforming?

• 23:24Speaker 04

  Well, good news for all the unconfident athletes out there. You don't really need confidence to perform at your best. That is a big old myth.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 23:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. So here's Australian Olympic team lead psychologist Caroline Anderson again.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  I'm not saying confidence is bad. Hey, if you're an athlete that's naturally really confident or always feels confident, fantastic. But confidence isn't what predicts outcomes and performance. It's our actions and ability to focus in the moment that predicts outcomes and performance. And so when we free up a bit of space not to worry as much about how confident we're feeling, we can actually just focus on the things, you know, our behaviour, actions and areas of focus, rather than worrying about how we feel.

• 24:06Speaker 04

  There's huge pressure on athletes to feel confident 24/7, 365. And like any emotion, confidence levels go up and down naturally. You know, sometimes you're happy, sometimes you're not. Sometimes you feel confident, sometimes you don't.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  And what tends to happen is then athletes don't understand this. They feel bad, they ruminate, then they actually end up feeling less and less confident because of that initial normal degree of change and variability around confidence. So what we talk about is that confidence isn't an added bonus. If you have it, that's great. And if you don't, it's actually not something to get too caught up in.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  Still, society reinforces the idea that if you feel good going into something, you'll do well. And if you feel crap, you'll do crap.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  And yet, when we speak to people about this in more detail, that you can feel really good and prepared and confident, and then actually not have a good performance. So that kind of breaks that assumption. But you can also feel not very good, not very confident, and have a fantastic performance. It's just that we like to feel good in order to perform good.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  Okay, so we've been focusing on choking under pressure in sport, but there are so many takeaways here for people who are not elite athletes, like you and me.

• 25:20Speaker 04

  Speak for yourself.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Definitely, definitely me. We've touched on a few, like mentally rehearsing stressful situations so you can cope and using mindfulness techniques to anchor your attention in the present. What else is there that we can learn from these techniques?

• 25:35Speaker 04

  Yes, mere mortals. I think the one about rethinking how moderate anxiety manifests itself in the body, that's a really useful one. So if you're going into a job interview or you're standing up to deliver a speech at a wedding, you know, you tell yourself that the feeling of your heart racing and your palms getting a bit sweaty, that's excitement. So it might mean you're less likely to freeze up once all eyes are on you, like I did when I was 10 years old.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  I feel like I will struggle to convince my panicking brain that that is the case, but I will give it a go. And what about for you and your weekend footy? How will that help for that?

• 26:10Speaker 04

  Well, I'm glad you asked.

• 26:13Speaker 05

  You know, I consider myself a weekend warrior and I definitely don't have all of this figured out. But I think, you know, really focusing on what it is about sport that you like doing, what is it about sport that you find enjoyable? And really trying to focus your attention on those things, you know, particularly at a community level. Often it's about, you know, getting outside, being with mates, having a run around, being able to kind of shift your focus and attention on to those things. I think helps it feel like a more well-rounded situation rather than, did I play well or was I terrible?

• 26:47Speaker 04

  And Lou, my goal-kicking teammate who had that horror run in 2022, she's moved on.

• 26:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, it happens to elite athletes all the time. Like, you know, I watch a lot of football and I watch my team play and I go off my tree about their kicking at goal because it's pretty poor. And you think, you know, this is something you practise every single day. This is your job. But then you go, well, I don't do my job perfectly every day either. We're not playing for sheet stations or it's, you know, it's a local footy game, but you still have a care about it and some investment in it. Otherwise, what's the point?

• 27:24Speaker 04

  And last year, she led the goal-kicking for the league and we won the premiership.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  That is amazing. That's so exciting.

• 27:31Speaker 04

  Thanks very much. But you know what? That means the pressure's really on us this year.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 27:40Speaker 04

  You know, it's really quite amazing the insights that we've gained in athlete mental health and performance under pressure over the past couple of decades. When Caroline Anderson represented Australia at the 2004 Athens Olympics, she was studying psychology at the time and was almost a fully qualified psychologist by that point. When you look back at yourself as that athlete 20 years ago, what would you say to her?

• 28:04Speaker 03

  It's normal and it's okay. I really felt and put so much pressure on myself that I had to feel a particular way, that feeling not confident was a bad thing. I have a very vivid memory of one moment walking down the, in the village at the Olympic Games and looking around and every athlete looks amazing and fit and strong and having this surreal experience that I'm just Caroline from the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. What am I doing here? How did I get here? I've spent the last 20 years working and researching since then and finding that this newer approach and what the research and the evidence shows us, it has much better outcomes and efficacy than maybe some of those older approaches.

• 28:49Speaker 03

  So yeah, I always think, oh, I'd be such a great athlete right now if I knew these things.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  The benefits of hindsight. Big thanks to Caroline Anderson, Mary Spillane, Chris Massano and of course Louise for sharing her experience on the field. That's it for All in the Mind this week. Thanks to sound engineer Russell Stapleton and producer Rose Kerr and to you Belinda Smith for reporting this episode. I'm Sana Qadar. Thank you for listening. I will catch you next time.