In example, if you were really good at throwing darts and you would hit bullseye every time, and then you were told that you would lose all your money if you missed the next throw, for some reason you start feeling like you can’t even hit the entire target and probably will miss a lot. Wouldn’t it make sense that anxiety increased your performance instead?
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In many cases it’s because you split your focus. Your brain is using half its attention thinking about how something could go wrong(the consequences of failing) that you have only half to actually do the thing you need to do.
Example can be skiing down a mountain path. If you keep saying to yourself “dont hit a tree, dont hit a tree”, you will be focused on the trees and trying to avoid them, which will make you pay less attention to the path itself.
If you just focus on following the path and ignore the trees, you wont hit a tree anyway if you just follow the path.
That only happens if you feel too much anxiety. In psych research, there’s the famous Yerkes-Dodson curve, but there are also alternative models of how stress (anxiety included) affects performance: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes%E2%80%93Dodson_law#Alternative_models](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes%E2%80%93Dodson_law#Alternative_models)
The basic idea in the simple yerkes-dodson view is that you need a certain degree of interest + attention + physical activation to perform maximally. In the extreme, you aren’t going to do very good on any test if you are asleep (low physical activation, no attention). You also will have a hard time if you are paralyzed with fear or shaking from anxiety (too much physical activation).
There’s also the fact that how someone does a task they’re expert at is different than a beginner. Experts often don’t consciously think very hard about the task because it’s all part of their “muscle memory” (procedural memory). Procedural memory is not very conscious. You simply do it. And your brain just knows how to tell your body to react. E.g., my ability to type on a keyboard is all procedural. If I thought too consciously about it, I might have to look at the keys to make sure I am hitting them right. Anxiety makes you think too hard.
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