Worry as a bridge between self-compassion and competition anxiety in athletes: evidence from mediation and network analyses

Background Competition anxiety is a pervasive concern in sport, yet the mechanisms linking self-compassion to its cognitive and somatic dimensions remain incompletely understood. This study extended prior work by examining whether worry and rumination mediate the self-compassion-anxiety relationship in athletes, testing measurement invariance across subgroups, and mapping the network architecture connecting self-compassion facets, repetitive negative thinking, and anxiety dimensions. Methods This study analysed openly available cross-sectional data from 263 competitive athletes (141 males, 122 females; mean age = 23.72 years) practising six sports. Measures included the Self-Compassion Scale, Penn State Worry Questionnaire, Ruminative Responses Scale, and Trait Competition Anxiety Inventory. Analyses proceeded in three phases: moderated mediation regression with 10,000 bias-corrected bootstrap samples, multi-group confirmatory factor analysis for measurement invariance across gender and sport type, and Gaussian graphical model network analysis with bridge centrality estimation. Results Worry significantly mediated the association between self-compassion and both somatic anxiety and concern, whereas the brooding pathway was non-significant. All moderation effects involving gender and sport type were non-significant. Metric invariance held across gender and sport type, though scalar invariance was not achieved. Network analysis identified worry as the node with the highest bridge strength (0.659) linking cognitive vulnerability to competition anxiety, while isolation was the self-compassion facet with the strongest bridge expected influence connecting to the cognitive vulnerability domain. The network was stable, with a correlation-stability coefficient of 0.593. Conclusions The protective effect of self-compassion on competition anxiety operates primarily through the reduction of worry, a mechanism that is consistent across gender and sport type. Worry and isolation represent promising intervention targets for sport psychologists seeking to reduce competition anxiety through self-compassion-based and cognitive strategies. Trial registration not applicable