“Performance anxiety is an acute feeling of fear or threat in a situation where performance is expected, triggering the sympathetic nervous system and impacting on both our psychology and physiology,” explains psychologist Lee Chambers. That means that it can result in both mental anguish and very real, physical symptoms.

Dr Josephine Perry, sports psychologist and author of Performing Under Pressure says that those chest pains or cramps come from our “threat system” becoming “over-activated.” We start to produce too many threat-response chemicals that circulate the body, and as a result, become “unable to focus in the way that is needed to perform at our best.”

Imagine for a moment that you’ve signed up to your first parkrun. You completed the Couch to 5K programme back in lockdown one, so you know that you can do the distance but it’s been a while since you ran it and you’ve never run with other people. As the morning dawns, you start to feel a little sick, a bit light headed. Perhaps you start to sweat uncontrollably or find yourself rushing to the loo more times than would otherwise seem normal. You may not actively be thinking ‘I can’t do this’, but somewhere in your brain, you’re unsure that your legs can actually carry you over the 5km mark. Those symptoms that feel a bit like the beginnings of a heart attack are your adrenal glands going into overdrive.

Dr Perry explains that when we feel under threat (whether that’s attack from a bear or Strava), our amygdala in our brain sends adrenalin and cortisol around the body. “These are the chemicals that get us ready for fight, flight or freeze, so we can handle the scary thing that we are facing.” Those chemicals make our hearts pump faster, increasing our breathing rate. They’re also responsible for that queasy feeling in your belly.

“All of these feelings can make it hard to perform well as an athlete,” she says.

Performance anxiety: why we panic at races and competitions and how to quell the fear