What are Nerves?
Imagine being sat in a changing room about to head out on to the pitch to play in a championship final or standing at the side of stage before having to go on and make a speech to a room of 100 people. What feelings are going through your body? Is your heart rate getting faster? Your palms getting sweaty? Are you feeling the butterflies in your stomach? What about your behaviour in these situations? Are your thoughts spinning about possible outcomes from this situation? Are you being quiet and withdrawn from everyone else? All these (and more) are the symptoms of nerves.
When we look at nerves, we can see the present of the stress response, commonly known as fight, flight or freeze. This response can appear under conditions on real or perceived stress (Russell & Lightman, 2019) and signals that it has been triggers by creating feeling of anxiety in the mind and body (Robinson, 1990). We can view this in a basic sense, the body perceives a threat or stress situation and responses by preparing the body to enter one of the stress responses, fight, flight or freeze. This can be the cause of the symptoms of nervousness from the stress response being like the symptoms of doing psychical activity, increased heart rate, deeper breathing, sweating. The body is preparing for action in both situations. This is important as with the right tools and systems, we can use this stress response and physical readiness to our advantage.
Looking at nerves from another angle, a 1908 paper from Yerkes & Dodson first explored the concept of understanding nerves in sport through arousal. The inverted U hypothesis states that a players performance increases as arousal increases but only to a certain point where after as arousal rises, performance reduces. This concept is widely used across sport psychology but needs to be adapted for different sports as some sports required differing levels of arousal to reach peak performance (Zaichkowsky & Naylor, 2004).
How can I manage them?
As highlighted above, nerves and that anxious feeling is often going to be present before our performances. This can be seen as a positive thing as it shows the performance matters, and you want to do well. But it is important to remember, being nervous is ok, being too nervous isn’t ok. We want to make sure that our arousal stays at our peak and that we utilise the stress response for our benefit. Below are two strategies to help do so, establishing a pre-performance routine and using reframing self-talk.
Nerves often occur prior to perform, but can occur during it also, for example, needing to hit a last minute free to win a match. Establishing a pre-performance routine is a great tool to reduce the impact nerves may play and bring you back into control. We often see set piece takers (closed skills) in sports such as GAA, soccer, and rugby, going through a routine prior to taking the kick/strike. Some notable examples of these include Cristiano Ronaldo with his steps back from the ball, power pose and deep breathes, or English Rugby legend Johnny Wilkinson crouching forward with his hands clasped together. These may appear unnecessary, but they provide the athlete with a chance to settle themselves and repeat a controllable action that they have done thousands of times, helping reduce that feeling of nerves, even in pressure situations. We can use this idea pre-game also. We all have a routine before a match but maybe we just don’t see it. But, by doing something simple, repeatable, and achievable in the time frame you have, like Ronaldo and Wilkinson, we can take back control our minds and the nervous it is experiencing and follow a routine that prepares us to perform. An example to consider is something I use when preparing for hurling matches. I will arrive at the changing room, get on my shorts and socks then foam roll and do band work. From that we go out onto the pitch for our first part of the warmup, back in for jerseys and talk, then out for the last part of warmup and the game. This simple and easily repeatable routine helps me prepare my body and mind to perform.
The second method to help manage feelings of nerves or anxiousness before a performance is using reframing and self-talk. Ash Barty, former Grand Slam winning Australian tennis player, used reframing to put herself in a more controlled mindset before stepping on to centre court in Wimbledon (view here). Barty asked herself the question, “What emotion will I choose today?” Her options, choose to be excited or choose to be anxious? Our feelings of nervousness are very similar to our feelings of excitement so by reframing our view of the feelings we experience and using positive and instructional self-talk to encourage our thoughts towards excitement, we can focus on the positive outcome and not the feeling of nerves.
I hope you enjoyed this blog post. If you did, please share it on your social media platforms and tag @omacperformance. If you would like support for yourself or your team, please reach out via the Contact section.
Thanks,
Oisin
References:
Robinson, L. (1990). Stress and anxiety. Nursing Clinics of North America, 25(4), 935-943.
Russell, G., & Lightman, S. (2019). The human stress response. Nature reviews endocrinology, 15(9), 525-534.
Zaichkowsky, L. D., & Naylor, A. H. (2004). Arousal in sport. Encyclopedia of applied psychology, 1, 155-161.