Pre-Match Nerves:
What to Train
Instead of Trying
Not to Be Nervous

A lot of players go into a match with the same goal: I just need to calm down. That makes sense. But it is usually the wrong goal.

If you are very nervous before a match, your system is activated. Your heart rate is up, your breathing changes, your thoughts speed up, and the body starts to feel less settled. So of course most players immediately want less of that.

And to be fair, there are ways to help with that in the short term. One of the most useful is the physiological sigh, also called cyclic sighing. The basic pattern is a full inhale through the nose, then a second smaller inhale at the top, followed by a long, slow exhale. In a 2023 Stanford-led study comparing several five-minute-a-day breathing protocols with mindfulness meditation, the exhale-focused cyclic sighing condition produced the largest improvements in mood and the largest reductions in respiratory rate among the practices tested. That can be very helpful before a match.

But it is important to understand what it is doing and what it is not doing.

It is helping regulate the state of the system in that moment. It is not solving the deeper reason the player is not calm in the first place.

The player is not nervous just because they have been breathing wrong. They are nervous because of what they are thinking, how those thoughts are being interpreted, what sensations those thoughts are creating in the body, and how much aversion they then have to those sensations. The player starts fighting the feeling, suppressing it, worrying about it — and that often intensifies the whole thing.

So the breathing technique is useful, but it is not the whole answer. It helps manage the activation. It does not by itself fundamentally change the player's relationship to feeling nervous. And that is why the sensations often come back. The player breathes, feels better for a while, and then later the nervousness starts rising again because the deeper pattern is still there.

The real variable
is not the sensation

Here is what that deeper pattern looks like. The sensation of nervousness — the tightness, the flutter, the acceleration — stays roughly the same from one player to the next. What differs enormously is how much resistance that player has to it. And it is the resistance, more than the sensation itself, that drives how disruptive the nervousness becomes.

Move the slider below to see what that actually means.

This is the core insight. The sensation of nervousness is not the enemy. What turns it into a problem is the additional layer — the resistance, the aversion, the effort to make it stop. That extra layer is what drives escalation. And that extra layer is trainable.

Do not meditate
to make it disappear

A player can absolutely do a mindfulness practice before a match, but they have to be careful not to use it the same way they use a breathing technique. Do not meditate in order to make nervousness disappear. That usually becomes just a subtler version of fighting the feeling.

If you want a short-term down-regulation tool, use the breathing technique for that. Use mindfulness for something different — to change your relationship to how you feel. To become less disturbed by being nervous. To become more okay with the sensations being there. To stop treating nervousness as proof that something is wrong.

That is a very different goal. And paradoxically, once a player stops fighting the nervousness so much, it often stops escalating as much. Not always immediately. Not perfectly. But over time, very often, yes.

Two different tools
for two different jobs

Both matter. But they are not doing the same job. If a player understands that distinction, the whole pre-match period becomes much clearer.

What to actually
do before a match

The exact technique matters less than people think. A lot of players ask: should I do a body scan, should I focus on the breath, should I do a visualization, should I label what I feel? Those are reasonable questions, but they are secondary.

What matters first is that the player is doing a technique they actually know how to do, can do, and are willing to do. And what matters most is not that the technique is somehow magical. What matters is that the player is using the mindfulness skills inside that technique. That means they are intentionally placing attention somewhere, trying to notice what is happening, and trying to allow what they find instead of immediately resisting it.

A body scan is one good structure for this. Not because a body scan is special, but because it gives the player a simple sequence. Sit down, move attention through the body piece by piece, and try to notice what is actually there — tightness, heat, pressure, fluttering, restlessness — without immediately trying to get rid of it. The same goes for thoughts. If thoughts come up — what if I lose, I need to settle down — the goal is not to have no thoughts. The goal is to notice them and not get completely pulled by them.

The baseline
is what needs to rise

A player has a certain baseline level of concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity even when they are not trying to be mindful at all. When they intentionally use those skills before a match, those skills can rise somewhat, because effort is now being applied. But simply trying to use the skills in that moment cannot raise them to a level the player has never developed.

When those skills are trained consistently and systematically over time, the baseline rises. The player becomes more mindful even when they are not explicitly trying to be. And then, when they do intentionally use the skills before a match, they rise from a higher starting point and function better there too.

So that over weeks and months, the same player begins to notice: I am still nervous before the match, but not as much. And even when I am nervous, it does not escalate the same way. And even when it is there, it interferes less. I get lost in thought less often, and when I do, I come back more quickly.

That change does happen. Not because the player has found the perfect hack or the one special pre-match routine. But because their attention is stronger, their sensory clarity is more precise, and their ability to allow internal discomfort has genuinely improved. So now, when nervousness starts to arise, they do not immediately pile more fear on top of it. They do not treat it as an emergency so quickly. And because of that, it often does not build in the same way.

The real goal before a match is not to become a person who never feels nervous. The real goal is to become a player who can feel nervous without that nervousness taking over everything. That is a much higher level of skill. And in the long run, it is much more reliable than trying, over and over again, not to be nervous.