- How can I learn to control my nerves?
It's a fascinating question because really,
the word nerves or the word nervousness,
is what's misleading,
and often that's the cause of poor performance.
And with folks that I work with in sport,
or in business, or in music,
oftentimes there's a misunderstanding that this nervousness,
the stuff we feel is bad for us
and is causing a detriment in our performance
when really it's a misassociation.
And it's oftentimes an accidental habit that we get into.
Here, let me explain a little bit.
The concept of nervousness is really physiological arousal,
so when you get nervous, what do you feel?
You feel butterflies in your stomach,
your hands shake a little bit.
You get, you start to sweat.
Your mouth gets a little dry.
Your mind can race a little bit,
and if you think
of each one of these physiological variables,
each one of these changes that we're experiencing,
it's our body preparing for the flight or fight response.
It's really our system preparing
to engage in the physical task
at a higher level than we're usually capable of.
And if you look at 100 yard sprinters, for example,
100 yard sprinter will always race faster
when they're nervous than when they're not nervous
because when they're not nervous,
they don't have the extra adrenaline.
They don't have the glucose being shifted
to their muscular system.
They don't have extra oxygen in their bloodstream.
All of those things are great for performance,
and the same thing if you're looking at musicians,
the ability for your hands to have greater dexterity,
the ability for your mind
to be able to process information at a greater rate.
All those things happen
when our body takes glucose, blood, and oxygen,
our three real survival substrates,
and shifts them from things like digestion,
shifts them away from average survival tasks
into performance tasks.
So when we're, when our body's usually sedentary,
we're spending a lot of our energy in digestion,
and when we shift that energy to our muscle
and our brain for performance tasks,
we feel our stomach shrinking.
We feel the acid leaving our stomach.
We sense that pit in the bottom of our stomach
and our saliva starts to dry up.
And those are the experiences
that we feel when we get nervous,
but really it's our body doing a very, very efficient job
of shifting glucose, oxygen, and blood
to where we need it the most.
So why do we misassociate this with poor performance?
Well, usually what happens is when you're young,
when you're six years old,
and you give your very first concert,
or when the teacher asks you for the very first time
to come and stand up in front of class,
or you play your very first little league game, for example.
At that age,
that's the very first time we experience these nervousness
'cause it's the very first time
we're put in pressure situations.
So we experience them, we don't know what's going on.
This is a very foreign feeling to us,
and then we go out and we perform poorly.
Well, why do we perform poorly?
Well, because we're six, we're learning our task.
We're brand new to music or to sport
or to public speaking, for example.
Or let's say you get the lead in the school play,
it's the very first time
you've been on stage with an audience,
and it's also the very first time
you've had to memorize lines.
The first time you've had to think in terms of
where you need to be positioned on stage,
and because they're all new tasks to us,
our performance level isn't very high,
at least certainly not in reference
to what we've seen other people do,
professional actors and musicians and athletes.
So we evaluate ourselves post-performance, and say,
"Gosh, I was not very good at all."
And we wonder why that is.
And we have this new experience fresh in our mind
of this physiological feeling,
and so, well, it must be that.
And then we get a series of this.
The next time we go perform, the same thing happens,
the next time we perform, the same thing happens,
and over time we get this misassociation,
we develop the habit thinking
that the arousal has caused poor performance,
when they're real independent.
We have this thing called anxiety,
which we need to distinguish from arousal.
Anxiety is the psychological component,
and that's just what you're doing
when you're assuming there's a connection between the two.
You're interpreting the physiological arousal
as a negative thing,
so when I work with performers,
really what we have to tackle is
trying to retrain this habit.
We have to understand that the arousal stuff is good,
and the anxiety is the stuff getting in our way,
so we need to to break the difference
between what's happened to us physiologically
and what we're doing
on an interpretation and perception level.
And that means, looking at performances,
trying to figure out where's the arousal enter the picture,
and where's our interpretation of that arousal start.
And then let's tackle that interpretation.