HOW TO CONTROL YOUR NERVES: 8 TIPS THAT WORK - ARTE - 2025

Learning how to control nerves and anxiety is important when dealing with exams, stressful work, family obligations, exhibitions, interviews, sports matches and any other situation that generates nervousness.

Feeling nervous before an event is a normal and even adaptive response of the body that makes us alert to the stimuli around us when it perceives some danger.

For example, getting nervous a few days before having an important exam helps us focus on studying, since we feel bad about ourselves if we are doing other tasks.

However, if this nervousness limits you in some aspects of your life. For example, if you are nervous in a job interview, you will not be able to expose your qualities correctly, the interviewer can take a bad image of you and, in the end, you may not get the job.

In addition, the physiological symptoms that we show, such as trembling or shaking, further accentuate the psychological discomfort we feel, so that nervousness also increases. All these behavioral and physiological manifestations hinder a correct performance in the task we intend to carry out.

Therefore, having remedies to calm and tame your nerves is important to achieve some personal goals and avoid feeling too much discomfort. Avoiding too much anxiety and managing it will help you redirect your energies and even benefit from a certain degree of activation.

Tips to control nerves and anxiety

1. Learn to perform relaxation techniques through breathing

Breathing is a process that we do almost unconsciously throughout our lives. Depending on our emotional, physical state, etc., it becomes faster or slower, depending on the amount of oxygen our body needs.

When you get nervous, your body interprets that you are in a situation of real danger, so it prepares itself for fight or flight.

As your breathing speeds up, you also experience an accelerated heart rate, increased muscle tension, and a decreased ability to reason and verbalize your ideas.

This breathing process, despite not normally depending on our will, is susceptible to control with a simple training.

First of all, it is important that you start practicing at home, in a situation where you are not nervous, so that you can perform the breath control exercise in the best possible way - later you can do it in situations of real nervousness, to generalize this type of breathing.

Take a few minutes to focus on the way you breathe. Putting your hands on your abdomen will help you perceive how often you breathe. Then begin to breathe in deeply and slowly through your nose. Work on holding the air for about 3-4 seconds.

Exhale the air through your mouth, very slowly. A trick to knowing how slowly you should breathe out is to imagine that you have a lit candle in front of your mouth and you don't want it to go out.

Repeat this exercise for about 10-15 minutes, so that you can perceive the changes that take place in your body –with the passage of time, you will notice that you feel calmer, relaxed and with less worries-.

If you do this activity frequently, your body can automate this type of deep breathing, which will help reduce your muscle tension, your heart rate and your state of nervousness.

When you have practiced this technique enough, you can put it into practice in those situations where you get nervous, which will help you to be much more relaxed and calm.

2. Don't run away from the situation that causes you nervousness

When a situation causes you extreme nervousness, it is normal that you feel like running away, for fear of failure, criticism and making a fool of yourself.

However, fears are only overcome when you face them, since, if you avoid them or run from them, you will only get them to have greater power over you.

Therefore, if you are afraid to speak in public, you will have to accept the fact that in the first few occasions your body will respond with a certain level of nervousness but, little by little, when your body gets used to the situation, you will be more calm and peaceful.

In addition, you yourself will perceive that your confidence and security in yourself increase as you expose yourself to situations that make you nervous, since you realize that you are capable of doing it.

Therefore, perceive these situations as challenges, rather than as threats to your physical integrity.

3. Help yourself with positive self-instructions

Self-instructions are messages that we give ourselves - consciously or unconsciously - and help us to have information about our performance in some task.

Surely you have ever said to yourself phrases like: "what a shame, I'm making a fool of myself", "everyone will realize how nervous I am", and so on.

As you can imagine, these phrases will not help you achieve your goal of performing a task well, quite the opposite. Therefore, so that you can help yourself to be calmer, you can train some positive self-instructions.

Here are some examples that you can use, depending on whether you apply them before the dreaded situation occurs, during or after it:

Before the situation.

"Everything is going to be fine."

"There are no real reasons to worry about."

"You have faced worse situations before."

During the situation:

"I'm doing very well."

"I am breathing deeply."

"I'm calm, I'm doing it."

After the situation.

"I have done better than I expected."

"I am proud of myself".

"Every time I will do a little better and it will be easier for me."

Practice these kinds of positive self-instructions and you will gain greater control of your nervousness.

4. Drink water or take a break

Of course, there will be situations in which you feel that your nervousness overwhelms you, that the physical symptoms are becoming too accentuated and you cannot control it.

In these cases, you can momentarily escape from the situation that produces this state of extreme nervousness - but you must always re-expose yourself.

If it is an exposure at work, apologize for having to leave the room for a few minutes, put into practice the tips mentioned above and, when you notice that your breathing and heart rate are normalizing, expose yourself to the situation again.

Drinking a glass of water will help calm your nerves and, if you chew gum or have a piece of candy, you can get a greater calming effect.

This happens because your body perceives that if you are eating or drinking, it is not a real dangerous situation - if we were running from a predator that wants to attack us, we would not stop to eat or drink.

The important thing is that you always come back to face the situation from which you have escaped because of your nervousness, since if you abandon it completely, your belief that you are not capable of achieving it will increase.

5. Get enough rest

One of the reasons you may feel especially nervous or irritated is because of a lack of physical rest.

Stress, nerves and irritability can increase on those days when the rest you have taken has not been proportional to the physical and mental effort you have made.

Although it may seem incredible to you, when you study or carry out tasks that require your intellectual abilities, you need more hours of sleep to recover - just like when you do intense physical effort.

Therefore, spend enough time to have a good night's sleep, since this way you will be better prepared to face the daily challenges in your work, in the academic field and in your personal relationships.

Try that nervousness is not a cause of insomnia, since it can have negative consequences on the performance of your day-to-day tasks.

6. Develop self-confidence

The state of nervousness usually occurs when we perceive that we are not sufficiently prepared or we have low security or confidence in ourselves.

We also tend to get nervous when we think that our actions can have disastrous consequences - such as not getting a job, in the case of a job interview.

Therefore, the more confident we are in our abilities, the more confident we are of ourselves, the less nervous we will be and the better our attitude will be.

Continuing the example of the job interview, what you have to do to develop greater confidence in yourself is to prepare very well what you want to say, plan answers to common questions -such as, what are your strengths and weaknesses-, find detailed information about the company in question, etc.

In addition, you should be careful with your physical appearance, ensuring that your image fits the specific position you are applying for.

It is not about completely changing the way you dress, simply that your clothes and accessories do not attract excess attention, so that all the attention falls on what you are saying.

In the case of exhibitions - academic or work -, a good tactic to develop your confidence would be to establish a script about everything you want to talk about - without the need to memorize the speech - and practice it with some members of your family, friends or partner.

In this way, you will be able to face a situation similar to the real one and you will have the opportunity to practice different ways of presenting your exhibition.

7. Practice sports regularly

The practice of physical exercise has many advantages, including the possibility of relieving the nervousness and stress produced throughout the day.

Therefore, you will be able to benefit from the effects that sport has on your health and psychological well-being, as long as you do it regularly.

If you do the sport in the morning, you will notice that you are more relaxed and in a better mood to deal with the altercations that occur during the workday.

8. Avoid stimulants like caffeine

Another important aspect that you should control is the consumption of stimulant substances, such as caffeine. Reduce your intake of coffee, energy drinks or sugar-rich soft drinks, so that the nervousness you feel decreases little or little.

If you need to consume these types of substances to finish the workday, you should consider other alternative methods, such as increasing the number of hours of sleep during the night or starting to take daytime naps.

If you are also a smoker, you may turn to tobacco when you are most nervous, feeling more relaxed after consuming a cigarette.

If this happens to you, it means that you have developed a physical dependence on tobacco, so that your body reacts with behavioral manifestations - trembling, nervousness, craving to smoke - when you have not smoked for a long time.

It is recommended, in these cases, that you consider gradually quitting smoking, since, as you can see, nervousness can be both a cause and a consequence of smoking.

These are the tips that we give you so that you can better control those situations in which you feel nervous.

Here is a video-summary of the article:

References

1. Lara, MDC, Ontiveros, M., Berlanga, C., & De la Fuente, JR (2013). Differences between panic attacks and generalized anxiety on the Hamilton Anxiety Scale.
2. Meichenbaum, D., Fibla, J., & Toro, J. (1987). Stress inoculation manual. Spain: Martínez Roca.
3. Rojas, E. (2000). The anxiety. Pocket-size.