Picture this: Your team is 2 points down in the deciding game of the NBA finals. There are 4 seconds left on the clock. Your teammate passes you the ball. You somehow find yourself in space, so you set up your shot, when–boom!

You’re fouled.

Two seconds left on the clock.

Two free throws.

Two successful conversions needed to push the game into over-time.

Your teammate hands you the ball. This is your moment. Your time to shine.

And so you step up to the free-throw line.

Shut your eyes.

Take a deep breath.

You do everything you can to calm those nerves. But it’s no use. Your muscles feel tight. Your whole body is stiff. Your palms are sweaty. Knees weak. Arms are heavy. Negative thoughts swirl non-stop around your head: The consequences of missing this shot, the what ifs.

So how do you compensate?

You force yourself to focus on the task at hand: The free throw. You break the movement down into its individual components, try and control each of these individual steps. You try to remember every single coaching cue you used to first learn the movement. Because gone are those relaxed times from training, where you could hit 100 successful free throws without so much as ever thinking about the movement.

This is completely different.

And so you find yourself consciously controlling a movement which would otherwise be automatic. You place your hands in their correct position on the ball. Aim carefully. The time has come. You bend at the knees, shoot the ball off your fingertips, making sure that you follow through with the shot. The ball leaves your hand, but the shot felt stiff, stilted. The movement felt everything but fluid.

Or maybe this anxiety acts as a distraction, pulling attention away from the sources of information which are crucial for ensuring you make the shot: hand positioning, foot placement, aiming at the correct spot on the net. Instead, you fill your mind with worries about missing the shot. You focus on the source of the threat: the crowd, the TV cameras, your parents in the front row. You forget important steps in your pre-shot preparation routine. Your hand placement is all wrong. Your feet are in an unnatural position. Your eyes aren’t locked on the spot on the net where you wish the ball to land.
But you take the shot.

And so what happens?

You watch, hoping—praying—but it’s not use. The ball misses the net. Your world comes crashing down. You choked. You failed to execute a movement which, under normal circumstances, you could complete with your eyes closed.

Anxiety got the better of you.

Now imagine this: You’re 75 years old. It’s only February, but you have already fallen twice this year. You live alone. There’s no food in your fridge, so you’re forced to leave the safety of your house to head to the local grocery store. It’s only two blocks away, but the sidewalk en-route is poorly maintained and the paving stones are uneven. To make things worse, the whole sidewalk is covered in ice. You’re nervous. Anxious about falling.

You take a deep breath, hoping to calm those nerves.

But it’s no use. Your muscles feel tight.

Your whole body is stiff. Your palms are sweaty. Negative thoughts swirl non-stop around your head: The consequences of falling over, the what ifs?

So how do you compensate?


ou force yourself to focus on the task at hand: Maintaining your safety while walking. You break the movement down into its individual components. You try and control each of these individual steps—quite literally. And so you find yourself focusing all your mental effort towards controlling a movement which you carry out hundreds, if not thousands, of times a day, usually without so much as a thought. You walk a few steps, but everything felt stiff, stilted.

And so what happens?

Maybe you are focusing so hard on controlling your movement that you fail to spot an upcoming trip hazard: an uneven paving stone or a patch of ice. You slip on this ice and—as a result of adopting this stiff, stilted pattern of movement—are not fast or fluid enough to make the necessary rapid reactionary step to regain your balance. Either way, the prognosis looks grim; a fall, likely.
Or maybe this anxiety acts as a distracter, filling your mind with worries about falling. You focus solely on the source of threat—the uneven paving stone or the patch of ice—at the expense of proactively scanning your environment, thereby limiting your ability to perceive and identify other upcoming threats to your balance, such as an upcoming cyclist.

It seems ironic that changing one’s behaviour to prevent the occurrence of an event can actually increase the likelihood of this event occurring. But, unfortunately, it seems that this is exactly what happens when we perform a motor-skill under anxiety, whether that skill is performed by an expert athlete trying to immortalise themselves in sporting history (see Masters & Maxwell, 2008, for a full review on how consciously controlling/monitoring movement can negatively impact motor skills), or an older adult simply trying to avoid falling over (Young & Williams, 2015).

At first glance, expert athletes performing under extreme anxiety couldn’t be further from older adults experiencing worries about falling. But as this anecdote demonstrates, these situations share many similarities. By acknowledging this, researchers develop the opportunity to apply theory and knowledge from the domain of sport psychology to elderly fall-risk.
Basketball stars and your grandparents. One and the same. Who would have ever known?