Pre-competition anxiety: when nerves help and when they get in the way

Twenty minutes before the match. The changing room smells of massage oil, someone is playing music too loudly, the coach is drawing on the whiteboard one more time. She sits on the bench, tying her shoes for the third time, and feels her heart pounding in her throat. Her hands are cold, there’s a stone in her stomach. And one single thought in her head: “If I’m this scared, why do I even play?”

Almost everyone who has ever competed has asked themselves this — from a child at their first school cross-country race to an adult who has been playing in a league for fifteen years. Pre-competition anxiety is one of the most universal experiences in sport. And yet we talk about it very little, often in the form of advice that doesn’t help: “Just relax.” “Don’t think about it.”

In this piece I won’t be offering tricks for a better result — for that, the right person is a sport psychologist. I am writing as a therapist in training who is interested in what nerves tell us about a person, and when they are an ally and when they become an obstacle that pulls you away from something you love.

Nerves are not the enemy

First, something worth knowing: what you feel before a match is, at its core, your body getting ready for effort. Your heart speeds up to deliver more oxygen to your muscles. Your breathing quickens. Digestion slows down, because now is not the time for digesting. Your attention narrows. This is the same system that allowed our ancestors to run away or fight — and that allows you to sprint one more time in the final minute.

If you’d like a closer look at what happens in the brain during all this, I wrote about it in What happens in the brain during anxiety — and why the body reacts before you think. For now, only this matters: the physical signs before a match are not proof that something is wrong. They are proof that you care.

So the problem isn’t that nerves exist. The problem starts when you begin to read them as a threat — when you take your racing heart as a sign that you’re going to fail, and then start fearing the fear itself.

The curve everyone knows — and why to handle it with care

Anyone who has sat through a talk on sports preparation has probably seen an upside-down U: too little arousal means sleepy play, too much means you seize up, and somewhere in the middle lies the optimal point. The curve bears the names of Robert Yerkes and John Dodson.

It’s interesting what these two researchers actually did. In 1908 they observed mice that had to learn to tell a light passage from a dark one, receiving an electric shock of varying strength when they chose wrongly. They found that with the harder task, learning was fastest with weaker shocks, and with the easier task, with stronger ones. There is no neat bell-shaped curve about athletic performance in the original paper. That came later, when other authors generalised the findings to everything imaginable — from exams to penalty kicks.

In 1994 the Norwegian psychologist Karl Halvor Teigen traced in detail how this “law” changed over the decades until it came to mean something the original experiment never tested. That doesn’t mean the idea is entirely wrong. It means it should be taken as a rough guide, not a law.

What remains useful from this story comes down to two things. First, fine, complex movements — a free throw, a serve, a biathlon shot — usually benefit from less arousal than simple, explosive ones — a sprint, a weightlift. Second, every person has their own zone in which they perform best. Some play their best when they’re almost on the edge. Others when they’re as calm as a lake. Comparing yourself with a teammate who “never gets wound up” therefore doesn’t help much.

The same body, a different story

If nerves in themselves aren’t the problem, how you understand them matters. In 2012, Jeremy Jamieson, Matthew Nock and Wendy Berry Mendes published a study in which people carried out a stressful task — preparing and giving a speech in front of evaluators. Beforehand, half of them were told that physical arousal before a task is useful, that the body uses it to mobilise energy for a challenge. Those who heard this explanation had a more efficient cardiovascular response: their hearts pumped more blood and their blood vessels constricted less. Physically, their arousal looked more like excitement than like threat.

We call this reappraising arousal: instead of trying to force yourself to calm down, you give the physical signs a different meaning. I have written in more detail about what this looks like in practice in Stage fright: how to speak in front of people when you fear being judged, so here just briefly: the sentence “I’m excited, my body is getting ready” often works better than “Calm, calm, I mustn’t be nervous”. Trying to silence arousal often only turns it up.

In a match this matters all the more, because you can’t escape the physical signs. You’ll have them until the final whistle. The only question is whether you’ll play with them or against them.

When your hands forget what they know

There is a particular form of failure under pressure known as choking: an experienced athlete makes a mistake they would never make in training. A tennis player who has practised their serve ten thousand times suddenly doesn’t know how to toss the ball. A basketball player misses a free throw she could sink with her eyes closed.

The psychologist Sian Beilock and her colleagues studied this phenomenon in experienced golfers. She found something surprising. When experienced players had to pay close attention to the individual steps of the movement — how they held the club, how they swung it — they played worse than when their minds were elsewhere. Well-learnt movements run automatically. When, under pressure, you start consciously controlling every step, you interfere with them.

That’s why one of the worst pieces of advice before a big moment is “watch your technique”. For a beginner, it makes sense. For an experienced player, it can undo exactly what they have spent years building. Beilock and Carr also reported something encouraging: players who had already been exposed during practice to the feeling of being watched (by a camera, for example) later choked less under pressure. Getting used to pressure works better than avoiding it.

A routine as an anchor

Most experienced athletes have a short sequence of actions before they perform: bounce the ball three times, adjust the tape, breathe in, look at a spot. These are called pre-performance routines, and in sport psychology they are considered one of the better-supported tools.

Why do they work? A routine directs attention to something simple and familiar. It tells the body: now is the time I do what I know how to do. And it fills that dangerous moment before performing, when thoughts like to slip into “what if”.

A good routine is short and always the same, whether it is training or a final. That is exactly where its power lies: because the body knows it from countless training sessions, it brings a sense of familiarity into surroundings that are anything but familiar — a strange arena, packed stands, cameras. That is why you build a routine in training, not on match day.

But a word of caution here. A routine helps as long as it is flexible. When someone starts to believe that without exactly those socks, exactly that sequence or exactly that song the match is certainly lost, the routine is no longer an anchor but a new source of anxiety. If you notice that every departure from the ritual unsettles you, it is worth talking about.

When nerves become an obstacle

How can you tell nerves that help from nerves that harm? Not by how strong they are. Some top athletes describe intense tension before competitions, and it doesn’t stop them. What matters more is what the nerves do to you.

Pre-competition anxiety is often intertwined with perfectionism. Someone who feels that only a perfect result is acceptable stands before a court before every match. I wrote about how perfectionism and endless overthinking stem from the same fear in Perfectionism and overthinking: two sides of the same fear.

What is really at stake

This is where the view of psychotherapy differs from the view of sports preparation. A sport psychologist will ask: how can you perform at your best? I am more interested in: what does this match mean to you? Who is sitting in the stands? What happens at home after a defeat?

In relational family therapy, which I am training in, we notice that strong anxiety rarely concerns only the present situation. Often something older is being repeated in it: the feeling that love has to be earned, that your parents are only pleased when you win, that your place in the family depends on how well you did. A child who learnt that home goes quiet and cold after a defeat may, as an adult athlete, feel anxiety before a match that has little to do with the match itself.

A conversation between a father and his daughter after a match might go like this (a composite, not a real person):

“What happened today? In training you sink every shot.”
“I don’t know. When I stepped up to the line, I saw you were watching.”
“I always watch.”
“Yes. But today I felt I had to score for you.”
“For me? I’d have been happy even if you hadn’t.”
“Then tell me that sometimes. Before the match, not after it.”

The father in this conversation isn’t a bad father. Perhaps he never said that his love depended on the result. But children don’t only read words; they read faces, the silence in the car, questions that begin with “what happened”. Very often the most healing thing for pre-competition anxiety is exactly this: that someone who matters to you says clearly that they love you whatever the outcome. How to work through a defeat when it comes is the subject of Defeat, mistakes and shame: how an athlete works through failure.

Exercise: ten minutes before the match

This exercise is not a replacement for working with a sport psychologist. It’s a simple framework you can try at your very next match or training session when you feel the tension.

1. Name what you feel. Quietly, to yourself: “My heart is beating fast. My hands are cold. These are nerves.” Naming creates a little distance between you and the feeling.
2. Give your body a different meaning. Tell yourself: “My body is getting ready. This energy is for me.” Don’t try to force yourself to calm down.
3. Take three breaths with a longer out-breath. Breathe in for four, out for six or seven. You’ll find a more detailed description in the knowledge base under Breathing with a longer out-breath. The point isn’t to erase your nerves, but to stop them from growing.
4. Choose one external focus. Not technique, but a target outside yourself: the hoop, a spot on the net, the teammate you’ll pass to. Attention directed outwards interferes less with automatic movements.
5. Write one sentence after the match. Not about the result, but about how it went with your nerves. “Strong for the first three minutes, then gone.” In a few weeks you’ll have a map of your nerves that tells you more than any piece of advice.

Where this piece won’t help

Everything I have written applies to the nerves that are part of sport. It doesn’t apply to everything that can happen in the body before a match.

If before competitions you experience sudden attacks of intense fear with chest pain, a choking sensation or a fear that you’re going to die, see a doctor first. With athletes it’s particularly important to rule out heart problems. Once that has been ruled out, you may find it helpful to read Why a panic attack is not dangerous, even when it feels like a heart attack. If the anxiety isn’t tied only to matches but spreads into school, work and relationships, it makes sense to talk about it with your GP or a psychiatrist. You’ll find a short explanation of when anxiety is more than an ordinary response in the knowledge base.

Reappraising arousal isn’t a magic wand either. When anxiety is very high and a person is already overwhelmed, words don’t reach deep enough — then you first need to calm the body, and only then change the story. And sometimes the answer lies somewhere other than in techniques: sometimes nerves are telling you that you’re playing for someone else rather than for yourself, or that you want to give up a sport you once loved but don’t dare admit it.

Finally: I am a therapist in training under supervision in marriage and family therapy, not a sport psychologist. If your main question is how to improve your performance under pressure, the right person is a sport psychologist. Psychotherapy comes in when it turns out that your pre-match nerves carry a story bigger than the match.

What to remember

• Pre-competition anxiety is, at its core, your body preparing for effort — it isn’t proof that you’ll fail.
• The Yerkes–Dodson curve is a rough guide, not a law; everyone has their own zone in which they play best.
• When you give physical signs the meaning of readiness rather than threat, your body’s response can change too.
• Experienced athletes often choke under pressure when they start consciously controlling a movement they know how to do automatically.
• If your nerves last for days, push you into avoidance or put your worth at stake, it isn’t time for a new trick, but for a conversation.