What Did You Do With It? Reframing Performance Nerves

Why trying to calm down is the wrong cue under pressure, and how to channel pre-performance nerves into focused, ready energy.

By Scott K. Wilder · Pressure and Resets

GAME READY MINDSET™ SPORTS PERFORMANCE | MENTAL READINESS | RESEARCH DIGEST What Did You Do With It? Why the goal was never to stop being nervous — at the plate, on the penalty spot, or before you stand up to speak By Scott Wilder • June 2026 KEY TAKEAWAYS • “Calm down” is the wrong cue. Nerves and excitement are the same high-arousal state — you can’t switch the engine off, but you can re-aim it from anxious to ready. • The skill isn’t feeling calm; it’s what you do with the energy — name it, recall a past success under the same pressure, and channel it into one concrete job. • It’s a real but modest edge — and not every nerve is equal: the buzz of a prepared athlete is fuel to use; nerves from being unprepared are a signal to go prepare. Three people, three places, one feeling. A hitter steps into the box with the game on the line. A player sets the ball on the penalty spot and backs away. Someone stands at the side of a room, about to present to people who can change their career. The heart pounds. The mouth goes dry. The hands aren’t quite steady. And in all three, the same instinct fires: calm down. Make this stop. It’s the wrong instinct. Not just unhelpful — backwards. And the research on why is some of the most useful in this whole field. Because the question was never whether you were nervous. The question was: what did you do with it? Why “calm down” is the wrong cue Start with what most of us believe. In one well-known set of studies, the overwhelming majority of people said the best way to handle pre-performance nerves is to try to calm down. It feels obvious. It’s also, in the moment, close to impossible — and here’s why. Anxiety and excitement aren’t opposites. They’re the same physiological state: high arousal — pounding heart, sharp senses, energy with nowhere to go. Calm is the opposite of all of it. So “calm down” asks the body to slam from sixth gear into first while the engine is still screaming. Good luck. What’s far easier, the researcher Alison Wood Brooks found, is to shift from one high-arousal state to another — from anxious to excited. Same engine. Different direction. In her studies — across singing, public speaking, and math under pressure — people who simply told themselves “I’m excited” outperformed those who tried to calm down. They felt more confident and walked in with an opportunity mindset instead of a threat one. The nerves didn’t disappear. They got pointed at something. Your body is getting you ready There’s a second reframe that’s even more grounding, and it’s the one I’d put at the center of how we coach this. The pounding heart, the tight stomach, the buzz — that isn’t your body betraying you. It’s your body getting you ready. A racing heart is pushing more oxygen to your muscles and brain; heightened arousal sharpens your senses and quickens your reactions. Jeremy Jamieson’s research at Rochester showed that when people were simply taught this — that the stress response is functional, gamereadymindset.co Page 1 © 2026 Scott K. Wilder | Game Ready Mindset™ GAME READY MINDSET™ that the pounding heart is there to help — they performed better and showed healthier physiological responses under pressure than people told to ignore their nerves. The reframe is short enough to use in real time: this is my body, getting me ready. Notice what it does and doesn’t ask: it never tells you to fight the feeling or fake calm. It just renames what the feeling is for. So what do you do with it? A while back I watched one of my pitchers walk off the mound with his head down after a rough inning. Everything in me wanted to say something right then. But he was in it — living the moment — and sometimes the right call is to give a kid space and let him feel it. So I left him alone. Later, once the sting had cooled, I didn’t ask how he was doing or tell him to shake it off. I asked him one thing: what are you going to do with it next time? That question — what did you do with it, or what will you do with it next time — is the whole move. When a player tells me they were nervous, I don’t tell them to shake it off; I tell them it’s good they noticed, and then I hand the response back to them. Awareness is step one, but it isn’t the skill. The skill is what comes next. A few things that actually work: Name it honestly. “I’m nervous, and that means I’m ready.” Naming the feeling and relabeling it in the same breath beats pretending it isn’t there. Reach for the evidence. This is the one I lean on most with young athletes: think back to a time you felt exactly this — same nerves, same dry mouth — and it turned out fine. Or better than fine. You almost certainly have one, because nerves show up before the things you care about, and the things you care about are usually the things you’ve worked at. That memory isn’t a pep talk; it’s proof. Decades of confidence research point to past success as the single strongest source of self-belief — and here it’s in your own handwriting, telling you this feeling has come before your good moments, not just your bad ones. Make the athlete actually go there — picture the moment, feel that it worked — rather than just nodding at the idea. The vivid version is the one that sticks. Then channel it. This is where the breath and the rehearsal come in — a long exhale to steer the arousal, a quick mental rep of the swing or the kick you’ve already run a hundred times in your head. And pick one job. Nervous energy scatters; a single concrete focus — see the ball, hit your spot, nail the first sentence — gives it somewhere to go. It looks the same wherever the pressure shows up. The penalty taker whose heart is slamming doesn’t try to feel nothing — he picks his spot, sees the ball hit the net, and lets the energy carry the strike. The presenter whose hands shake doesn’t wait to feel calm — she names it, remembers the last talk that went better than she feared, takes one breath, and starts on the line she’s rehearsed. Different stage, same three moves: name it, find the evidence, point it at the next action. Nervous was never the problem. The only question is what you do with it. The honest limits Now the honesty, because this gets oversold too. Reappraisal is real, but it’s not magic, and the effect is modest. A 2024 meta-analysis of arousal-reappraisal and “stress-is-helpful” interventions found a small overall benefit, and the results were genuinely mixed across settings — meaningful for some tasks, like gamereadymindset.co Page 2 © 2026 Scott K. Wilder | Game Ready Mindset™ GAME READY MINDSET™ golf putting, weaker or absent for others. This isn’t a switch that turns pressure into gold. It’s a small, real edge — and small, real edges, practiced, are most of what separates people under pressure. One caveat matters most: not all nerves are the same. Some nervousness is your body getting ready, and that’s the kind you reappraise. But some nervousness is information — the quiet signal that you’re not prepared, that you skipped the work. That kind you don’t reframe away; you listen to it, and you go prepare. The reframe is for the athlete who’s done the work and feels the buzz anyway. It was never meant to paper over the one who didn’t. And one honest note about this article itself: understanding all of this — that nerves are arousal, that arousal is fuel you can re-aim — is not the same as being able to do it. The nervous system has a life of its own; it doesn’t take orders from a good idea you read once. Intellectual understanding is essential, because it tells you what to train. But the ability only becomes accessible the way any skill does — through reps, run when the stakes are low, until the response is wired in and shows up on its own when your heart is slamming and there’s no time to think. The coach’s move Which brings it back to that one question. When a kid says “I was so nervous,” the instinct is to reassure — “don’t be,” “shake it off,” “you’re fine.” But that teaches them the nerves are a problem to be solved. Try the other response: “Good. You noticed. What did you do with it?” Now the nerves are normal, and the work is in the response — the part they can actually train. Ask it enough times and they stop fearing the feeling and start getting curious about what to do with it. That’s the whole game. Because the athletes and performers who handle pressure best aren’t the ones who feel nothing. There’s no such person — and if there were, you wouldn’t want to be them, because the nerves are the caring, made physical. The ones who deliver feel all of it, recognize it for what it is, and know exactly where to point it. You’ll be nervous at the plate, on the spot, before the room. Good. That’s your body and mind getting you ready. The only question left is the one worth practicing the answer to: what are you going to do with it? Research Sources Brooks, A. W. (2014). Get excited: Reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(3), 1144–1158. Jamieson, J. P., Nock, M. K., & Mendes, W. B. (2012). Mind over matter: Reappraising arousal improves cardiovascular and cognitive responses to stress. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(3), 417–422. Jamieson, J. P., Peters, B. J., Greenwood, E. J., & Altose, A. J. (2016). Reappraising stress arousal improves performance and reduces evaluation anxiety in classroom exam situations. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7(6), 579–587. Crum, A. J., Salovey, P., & Achor, S. (2013). Rethinking stress: The role of mindsets in determining the stress response. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(4), 716–733. Effectiveness of stress arousal reappraisal and stress-is-enhancing mindset interventions on task performance outcomes: A meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. Scientific Reports, 14 (2024). gamereadymindset.co Page 3 © 2026 Scott K. Wilder | Game Ready Mindset™