Pre-Game Nerves: How to Turn Anxiety Into Performance

Your heart is thumping. Your hands are clammy. You've been to the toilet three times in twenty minutes and your stomach feels like it's full of something with wings. The match starts in a quarter of an hour, and a voice in your head keeps asking what happens if you mess it up.

If that sounds familiar, you're in good company. Almost every athlete gets nervous before competition, from children at their first swimming gala to Olympic finalists. Some of the most successful competitors in history have talked openly about being sick with nerves before big events.

What separates athletes who perform well under pressure is rarely that they feel nothing. It's how they understand and use those nerves. This guide explains what's happening in your body before competition, why the standard advice to "calm down" often doesn't work, what choking really is, and the techniques with research behind them that you can start practising this week.

What's happening in your body

Pre-competition nerves are your stress response switching on. When your brain decides something important is about to happen, it activates the sympathetic nervous system and releases hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. The effects are familiar:

• Faster heart rate to push more blood to your muscles.
• Quicker breathing to bring in more oxygen.
• Sweating, getting ready to cool you down.
• Butterflies or nausea, as blood is diverted away from your gut.
• Sharper alertness and heightened senses.
• Trembling or restless energy.

Look at that list again. Almost every symptom is your body getting ready to perform: more oxygen, more blood to the muscles, more energy, sharper attention. Physically, the response to a nerve-racking cup final is very similar to the response to an exciting one.

Anxiety versus arousal

Sport psychologists separate two things we usually lump together as "nerves":

• Physiological arousal: the physical activation described above. Some is needed for good performance. Too little and you feel flat; very high levels can make fine skills harder.
• Cognitive anxiety: the worried thoughts. "What if I choke?" "Everyone's watching." "I'm not good enough to be here."

A review by Stephen Mellalieu, Sheldon Hanton and David Fletcher summed up a central finding from decades of research: how athletes interpret their symptoms matters as much as how strong those symptoms are. Two athletes can have the same heart rate and the same butterflies. The one who reads them as readiness ("I'm up for this") tends to perform better than the one who reads them as a threat ("I'm falling apart").

Psychologists call this a facilitative versus a debilitative interpretation. The useful news is that it can be trained.

How much arousal is right?

You may have seen the "inverted U": performance improves as arousal rises, up to a point, then falls if it climbs too high. It's a reasonable picture, but it's too tidy. Two refinements from sport psychology are worth knowing.

First, the ideal level differs between people. The sport psychologist Yuri Hanin called this the "individual zone of optimal functioning". Some athletes perform best quite calm; others need to feel properly fired up. Your job is to learn where your own zone is, not to copy anyone else's.

Second, it differs between tasks. A golfer standing over a short putt needs steadier hands than a rugby forward about to hit a ruck. Fine, precise skills generally suit lower arousal; big, powerful efforts can handle more.

Why "just calm down" doesn't work

When people feel anxious they usually try to calm themselves down. Coaches and teammates say the same: relax, chill out, take it easy. It seems sensible, and it often doesn't work.

Alison Wood Brooks at Harvard Business School tested this in a set of experiments published in 2014. Participants faced stressful tasks: singing karaoke in front of others, giving a public speech, or solving maths problems under time pressure. Beforehand, they were asked to say one simple sentence out loud. Some said "I am calm." Others said "I am excited."

The "excited" group did better across the board. Their singing was rated more accurate, their speeches more persuasive and confident, and their maths scores were higher. They also reported feeling more excited, even though their anxiety hadn't gone away.

The likely explanation is that moving from anxiety to calm is a big jump. Your heart is racing and your body is buzzing, so telling it to be calm clashes with what you feel. Moving from anxiety to excitement is a much shorter step, because both are high-energy states. You keep the energy and change the label.

An earlier study by Jeremy Jamieson and colleagues found something similar. Students preparing for a major exam who were told that physical arousal can help performance scored higher on the maths section than students who weren't told this.

What choking really is

Choking is that sudden drop in performance under pressure: the easy putt missed, the penalty skied, the routine you've done a thousand times falling apart. It's not a lack of talent, and it's not the same as being nervous.

Research by Sian Beilock and Thomas Carr points to a specific cause in well-learned skills. Under pressure, people start paying conscious attention to movements that normally run on autopilot. An experienced golfer starts thinking about wrist angle and backswing length. That step-by-step monitoring disrupts a smooth, automatic skill. Beginners, who are still thinking about each step anyway, are less affected by this particular problem.

This explains why so many of the techniques below work by giving your attention something else to do. A short cue word, a fixed routine or a focus on the target keeps your conscious mind busy enough to let the skill run.

Where you look matters

Joan Vickers' research on the "quiet eye" adds to this. In aiming sports (golf putting, basketball free throws, darts, shooting), better performers tend to hold a steady final look at the target for a little longer before they move. Training athletes to lengthen that final fixation has improved accuracy in several studies. It's a practical tool: pick the exact spot, hold your gaze there for a moment, then go.

Six techniques to make nerves work for you

These techniques are simple. They aren't magic, and they won't stop you feeling nervous. What they do is give you a way to work with that energy instead of fighting it. All of them improve with practice, so start using them in training before you rely on them in competition.

1. Reframe: "I'm excited"

When you notice your heart racing before a game, say to yourself (or out loud), "I'm excited" or "My body's getting ready." You're not lying to yourself. Physically, nerves and excitement are close cousins. You're choosing the interpretation that helps.

Make it specific to your sport: "My heart's pumping blood to my legs. That's what I need for the first sprint." The more concrete it is, the more convincing it tends to feel.

2. Breathe with a longer exhale

Reframing works best when arousal is high but manageable. If nerves tip into panic (racing thoughts, a tight chest, shaky hands), a breathing technique can bring you down a notch. A systematic review by Andrea Zaccaro and colleagues found that slow breathing, around six breaths a minute, is associated with more activity in the parasympathetic "rest and digest" system and with less anxiety.

Try this:

1. Breathe in through your nose for a count of four.
2. Breathe out slowly through your mouth for a count of six to eight.
3. Repeat six to ten times.

The long exhale is the important part. Practise at home when you're relaxed so it becomes automatic, then use it in the changing room, on the start line or between points. The aim isn't to become calm. It's to take the edge off so you can think clearly.

3. Use instructional cue words

Anxiety pulls attention towards worries and away from the task. Short cue words help pull it back. A meta-analysis by Antonis Hatzigeorgiadis and colleagues, combining 32 studies, found that self-talk had a clear positive effect on sports performance. Instructional self-talk (about technique) helped most with fine skills, and motivational self-talk with strength and endurance tasks.

Pick one or two words linked to the skill you most need:

• A tennis player before a serve: "high toss" or "smooth".
• A sprinter in the blocks: "push" or "drive".
• A footballer taking a penalty: "pick a corner, strike through".
• A distance runner on a tough climb: "light and quick" or "strong".
• A basketball player at the free-throw line: "soft wrist".

Keep cue words short, positive and about what to do rather than what to avoid. "Don't miss" points your attention straight at missing.

4. Build a pre-performance routine

Watch elite athletes in pressure moments: a rugby kicker lining up a conversion, a basketball player at the free-throw line, a tennis player bouncing the ball before a serve. Most use a consistent routine. It gives their attention a job and makes the big moment feel like the thousands of practice repetitions before it.

Routines work at two levels:

• The pre-event routine: what you do in the hours before competing. When you eat, when you arrive, how you warm up, what music you listen to. Keep it consistent so the day feels familiar.
• The pre-skill routine: the few seconds before a key action. For example: one breath, cue word, look at the target, go.

Your routine should be short, simple and something you can do anywhere. Practise it in training until it feels automatic.

5. Focus on the process, not the outcome

A lot of competition anxiety comes from thinking about things you can't control: the score, the ranking, what people will think. Process goals point your attention at what you can control right now.

Instead of "I need to win this match", try "First serve in, move my feet, attack the short ball". Instead of "I need a personal best", try "Even pace for the first two kilometres, relax my shoulders, strong arm drive on the hill".

Write down two or three process goals before every competition. When nerves rise, go back to them. They give the energy somewhere useful to go.

6. Write the worries down

This one comes from exam research but transfers well. Gerardo Ramirez and Sian Beilock found that students who spent ten minutes writing about their worries just before a high-stakes test performed better than students who didn't. The idea is that writing worries down frees up the mental space they'd otherwise take up.

For athletes, try it the evening before or the morning of a big event. Write freely for five to ten minutes about what's worrying you. Then close the notebook and write your two or three process goals on a fresh page. Some athletes find it helps a lot; others prefer not to. Try it before a low-stakes event first.

Imagery: rehearsing the moment

Imagery, often called visualisation, is mental rehearsal. Done well, it's much more than picturing yourself lifting a trophy. Useful imagery is detailed and realistic: the sound of the crowd, the feel of the ball, the decision you make when the gap opens, and how you respond after a mistake.

A simple way to start:

1. Pick one situation, such as your first serve, the start of a race or taking a penalty.
2. Close your eyes and run through it in real time, from your own viewpoint, using as many senses as you can.
3. Include the nerves. Feel your heart rate rise, use your breathing and cue word, and see yourself perform the skill well.
4. Rehearse a recovery too: something goes wrong, you reset with your routine and carry on.
5. Do it for a few minutes, most days, in the week or two before a big event.

Imagery seems to work best alongside physical practice, not as a replacement for it. Wearing your kit or standing in the place you'll compete can make it feel more real.

Your pre-competition plan

Here's how to bring these techniques together for competition day. Adapt the timings to your sport.

Dealing with mistakes during play

Nerves often spike after an early error. A double fault, a dropped catch, a bad first kilometre. Many athletes find it helps to have a short reset routine for exactly this moment, separate from their pre-skill routine.

One simple version: acknowledge it ("that happened"), do one physical action to mark the end of it (wipe your hands on your shorts, adjust your strings, touch the ground), take one slow breath, then say your cue word for the next action. The whole thing takes a few seconds. The aim is to stop one mistake from turning into three.

Practising your mental skills

The biggest mistake athletes make with mental skills is waiting until the big day to try them. Under pressure you fall back on habits, so these techniques need to become habits first.

Practise in training:

• Use your breathing pattern between intervals or drills.
• Use cue words during technical practice.
• Rehearse your pre-skill routine on every practice serve, kick, shot or start.
• Set process goals for training sessions as well as matches.
• Add pressure to practice: keep score, set small consequences, have teammates watch. It gives you a safe place to practise performing while nervous.
• Use low-stakes competitions, like club races or friendly matches, to test your full pre-event routine.

For parents and coaches

Young athletes often feel nerves strongly and don't yet have the words or tools to handle them. A few things help:

• Normalise it. Tell them nerves are normal, that top athletes feel them too, and that their body is getting ready.
• Talk about effort and enjoyment rather than results, especially in the car on the way there.
• Keep the build-up ordinary. Familiar food, familiar timings, no big speeches.
• Teach one simple tool, like the long-exhale breath, and practise it together at home.
• After the event, listen first. Ask what they enjoyed before you ask what went wrong.

When nerves become something more

Pre-competition nerves are normal. For some athletes, though, anxiety becomes overwhelming. It might lead to panic attacks, a strong urge to avoid competing, trouble sleeping for days beforehand, or worries that spill into the rest of life.

If that sounds like you, talk to someone: a GP, a counsellor or a qualified sport psychologist. Many professional and university teams now have mental health support, and asking for help is part of taking your sport and your health seriously. Anxiety is treatable, and you don't have to manage it on your own.

The bottom line

Nerves before competition are a sign that something matters to you, and that your body is getting ready to meet the challenge. You don't need to get rid of them. You need a plan for using them.

Start this week with one technique. Say "I'm excited" the next time your heart races before training. Practise the long-exhale breath before bed. Pick a cue word for your most important skill. Mental skills are built the same way physical ones are: small, repeated practice, well before the day you need them. If the physical side of race day worries you too, our Zone 2 guide explains how to build the fitness that makes confidence easier to come by.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

1. Brooks AW. Get excited: reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2014;143(3):1144-1158.
2. Jamieson JP, Mendes WB, Blackstock E, Schmader T. Turning the knots in your stomach into bows: reappraising arousal improves performance on the GRE. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2010;46(1):208-212.
3. Hatzigeorgiadis A, et al. Self-talk and sports performance: a meta-analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2011;6(4):348-356.
4. Mellalieu SD, Hanton S, Fletcher D. A competitive anxiety review: recent directions in sport psychology research. In Hanton S, Mellalieu SD (eds), Literature Reviews in Sport Psychology. Nova Science, 2006.
5. Zaccaro A, et al. How breath-control can change your life: a systematic review on psycho-physiological correlates of slow breathing. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2018;12:353.
6. Ramirez G, Beilock SL. Writing about testing worries boosts exam performance in the classroom. Science, 2011;331(6014):211-213.
7. Beilock SL, Carr TH. On the fragility of skilled performance: what governs choking under pressure? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2001;130(4):701-725.
8. Vickers JN. Origins and current issues in Quiet Eye research. Current Issues in Sport Science, 2016;1:101.