How to Stop Overthinking in Sports

There is usually a moment in the second half where you can see it start.

The ball comes to your kid at the top of the box. In practice they hit that shot without a thought. Tonight they take a touch. Then another one. By the time they look up, the lane is gone and they play it backward to the center back, and the safe ball is now the right ball because they made it the right ball.

Nothing dramatic happened. They did not panic. They were just late.

That is what overthinking looks like from the stands, and it is why it goes unnamed for so long. Nobody is looking for a half step.

And here is what makes it so maddening to watch: the skill is completely intact. You saw it Tuesday. Something is sitting on top of it.

Why is my athlete half a step slow in games when they look fine in practice?

Because the part of the mind that learns a skill has taken over from the part that performs it. In practice your athlete lets the movement happen. In competition they start supervising it. Conscious control is slower than trained control, so the body arrives late even though the skill never left.

Athletes run two different mindsets, and most of them have only ever been taught one.

The practice mindset is deliberate. It evaluates. It breaks the movement into parts and works on them. Plant the foot. Keep the elbow under. Head down. That mindset is exactly right on a Tuesday, and it is how skill gets built in the first place.

The performance mindset is different. It is quiet. It reacts. It hands the job to the reps already in the body and gets out of the way.

Good athletes are usually excellent at the first one. That is why they are good. The problem is nobody ever taught them to put it down when the whistle blows, so they walk into competition still coaching themselves, and now there are two people trying to play.

Jackson Perotta was on the bench of a Division I soccer program, close to being a practice player. Nothing about his technique needed rebuilding. He was a starter by the end of it. What changed was who was driving.

Is this the same thing as performance anxiety?

They travel together, but they are not the same problem. Anxiety is about threat: what happens to me if this goes badly. Overthinking is about control: an athlete taking manual command of a skill that runs better on its own. A kid can be calm, even a little bored, and still overthink their way through an entire match.

That distinction matters, because the two need different work.

If your athlete's mind races because their nerves are up, and the racing mind then makes the nerves worse, that is the loop we wrote about in anxiety and overthinking in sports. Start there.

This post is about the other half. What to do with attention once it has already come loose, and why it comes loose in the first place.

Sometimes nerves have nothing to do with it. The trigger is a coach's last instruction still playing on a loop, or a mechanical tweak from Thursday that the athlete keeps checking on. Chase came back from a season-ending leg fracture in basketball with the leg fully cleared, and he spent weeks protecting it anyway, checking on it mid-play. His head had not been cleared yet. Nobody had taught him how to stop supervising the leg.

How do I know overthinking is what I am looking at?

Overthinking has a look, and it is rarely the panicked one parents are watching for. Look instead for an athlete who aims instead of swings, decides a beat late, repeats the coach's last correction mid-play, and treats a rough warm-up as a verdict on the whole day. Six signs, below.

See how many you recognize from your own sideline.

1. They guide instead of attack. The shot gets steered. The ball gets placed. Everything is aimed rather than hit.

2. The decision comes a beat late. They see it. They just arrive after the window has closed.

3. They are coachable to a fault. Whatever the coach said last is what they are thinking about during the play.

4. The warm-up becomes a verdict. A rough warm-up and you can tell from the stands that they have already decided how the day is going to go.

5. They try to fix their technique in the middle of competition. After a miss, you can watch them re-rehearse the mechanics instead of playing the next point.

6. They are best when it does not count. Great in scrimmages, flat at the tournament, and the body they brought to both was identical.

Four or more of those describes a skill gap rather than a talent gap or a toughness gap, and skills get taught.

So what do you do with a list like that? The first job is finding out which of the six is driving the others, because they are not equal and they do not all get the same work. Book a free 30-minute consultation and we will tell you exactly which piece is breaking down and what we would work on first.

Why doesn't telling them to stop thinking work?

Because attention does not take negative instructions. "Stop thinking" is still a job handed to the thinking mind, so now your athlete is managing two things instead of one. Attention will not go blank on request. It will go somewhere else, but only if you give it a specific somewhere else to be.

Every parent has tried it. Just relax. Just play. Get out of your own head.

None of it lands, and the athlete usually knows it will not land before you finish the sentence. Then they feel worse, because now they are failing at something that sounded simple.

Which is why the fix has to be a replacement rather than a subtraction.

What actually stops overthinking in sports?

Give attention a job outside the athlete's body. One external target, picked before competition, small enough to hold for a couple of seconds. The seams on the ball. The spot on the target. The catcher's glove. External focus crowds out self-monitoring without ever asking the athlete to stop thinking, which no human being can actually do on command.

The distinction is smaller than it sounds and it changes everything.

An internal cue points at the athlete. Elbow under. Hips through. Toe down. That is practice-mindset language, and using it in competition is an invitation to supervise.

An external cue points at the world. See the seams. Hit the back of the target. Feel the tempo. The body already knows what to do with that.

A shooter watches the bird, not the barrel. A tennis player picks a spot on the court, not a swing thought. A soccer player takes the defender's front hip, not their own first touch. A wrestler works a tie, not a checklist.

Underneath all of it is trust, which is the thing that actually got taken away. Overthinking is what a lack of trust looks like from the outside. The athlete does not believe the reps will show up without help, so they help, and the helping is the problem. We go deeper on that in decisiveness and trust in sports.

A high school volleyball player named Ashley wrote this to Amy after a season of it:

"You have really helped me realize when I'm getting in my head and how to get back focused. I learned how to not worry so much and focus on controlling what I can control and not overthinking!"

Realize when I'm getting in my head, and how to get back focused. Those are two separate skills and she names them in that order, which is the order they have to be learned in.

One of our high school wrestlers lost in the state final two years running, both times to the same kid. Year three he beat him and won the title. Nothing about his wrestling was new by then. He had stopped wrestling the match in his head while it was happening in front of him.

What can we do this week?

Pick one moment, write one external cue for it, and run that cue for a week. Not a new routine and not a mindset overhaul. Name the exact spot where it comes apart, give attention somewhere to go in that spot, rehearse the recovery in practice, and leave the warm-up alone. Here is the week.

Monday. Name the moment. Ask your athlete where it actually goes wrong. Not "in games." The specific spot. Stepping to the line. The first serve after a break. The play right after a mistake. If they cannot name it, they are guessing at the fix.

Monday. Write one cue for it. Four words, maximum. It has to point at something outside their body, and it has to be something they can see or feel, not something they have to decide. Write it on their water bottle.

Every practice. Last twenty minutes, no technique. This is the part everyone skips. The end of practice belongs to running the skill at game speed with the cue and nothing else, not to tinkering. Half of practice for building, half for trusting.

Every practice. Rehearse the catch. Overthinking will happen anyway. Teach the recovery: notice it, break it with something physical like a breath or a glove tug, send attention back to the cue. Three seconds. Practice it deliberately when it happens in practice, so it is not brand new on Saturday.

Saturday. The warm-up is not a test. Their practice is finished. The warm-up is a warm-up. However it goes, they compete with the skills they have that day.

Saturday night. One question in the car. "What were you looking at?" Not how did you play. Not what happened on that one. What were you looking at. It keeps the whole conversation on attention instead of judgment, and it is the only postgame question that has ever made this better instead of worse.

Six days of that is usually enough to know whether you are looking at the right problem. If the cue holds for a possession and then falls apart, you have found the moment. If your athlete cannot think of a moment to name on Monday, that is also information, and it is the more common answer.

Attention is one of the 21 mental skills we train at Victory Performance. It is usually the first one we touch, because most of the others sit on top of it.

Frequently asked questions

My athlete says their mind goes blank, not busy. Is that still overthinking? Often, yes. A blank mind under pressure is usually attention with nowhere to land, which is the same gap a cue fills. The athlete has no plan for where to look, so the mind either floods or empties. Both are attentional problems, and both respond to the same training.

Will they grow out of it? Usually not on their own. Every competition where an athlete overthinks makes the pattern a little more familiar, and by the second season it is what their body expects. It is very trainable, but it is not something that resolves by aging into it or by wanting it badly enough.

Can their regular coach fix this, or do they need a mental performance coach? A good coach helps a great deal, especially by cutting technical talk close to competition. But most coaches are trained to build skills, not to retrain attention under pressure, and they are managing a full roster. This is a specific skill set, taught individually, the same way a hitting coach is.

Should I say anything on the drive home? Say less than you want to. Evaluation on the ride home tells an overthinking athlete that they were being watched and graded, which is fuel for exactly the pattern you are trying to break. Ask what they were looking at, or ask nothing at all. Food is a fine substitute for analysis.

My athlete overthinks at school too. Is that the same problem? Sometimes, and it is worth mentioning at a consultation. Attention training tends to transfer, and parents often tell us it showed up in schoolwork before they noticed it in the sport. If the overthinking comes with sadness, sleep trouble, or withdrawal that lasts more than a couple of weeks, that is a different conversation and we will say so.

Where to start

This one is written for the athlete more than the parent, so here is the athlete version.

You are not slow and you are not soft. You are doing too much of the work yourself, in a moment that runs better when you let it run. That is a fixable thing and it is not a personality trait.

Pick your moment, write your four words, and give it a week. If it does not hold, come tell us where it fell apart. You can book the free 30-minute call yourself or text (757) 863-1349, and you can bring a parent or not.

About the author

Dr. Amy Thompson is the founder and head coach of Victory Performance. She is a triple board-certified physician — a pediatrician, adolescent medicine specialist, and sports medicine physician — and a certified mental performance coach, holding both the Mental Game Coaching Professional (MGCP) certification from Dr. Patrick Cohn and the Mental Performance Mastery (MPM) certification from Brian Cain.

She ran cross country at the University of California, Berkeley, competed internationally as a figure skater, and trained at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. She has coached athletes from middle school through the professional level.