If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Pre-competition nerves affect athletes at every level, from grassroots sport to the professional game. The good news… they’re not a sign that something is wrong and with the right tools, they’re something you can learn to work with rather than fight against.
In this blog, I’ll explain what’s actually happening when nerves strike and share a practical CBT-based approach you can use before your next competition.
Why Nerves Happen — And Why They’re Not the Enemy
Pre-competition anxiety is your body’s threat response doing exactly what it’s designed to do. When your brain perceives a high-stakes situation, it triggers a physiological response, adrenaline, increased heart rate, heightened alertness. This is the same system that kept our ancestors alive.
The problem isn’t the nerves themselves. It’s the story we tell ourselves about them.
When an athlete thinks ‘I’m nervous, this means I’m not ready’ or ‘I always fall apart under pressure’, the anxiety compounds. The body responds to thoughts as if they were reality. CBT helps us interrupt that cycle.
The CBT Framework: Thoughts, Feelings, Behaviour
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is built on a simple but powerful idea: our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are connected. Change the thought, and you can change how you feel and how you perform.
“It’s not what happens to you, but how you respond to it that matters.” — Epictetus
This Stoic principle, written over 2,000 years ago, is essentially the foundation of CBT. We don’t suffer from the situation itself, we suffer from our interpretation of it.
Here’s what that looks like in practice for a nervous athlete:
- Situation: Big match tomorrow
- Automatic thought: ‘I’m going to freeze under pressure’
- Feeling: Anxiety, dread, physical tension
- Behaviour: Disrupted sleep, avoidance, poor warm-up
CBT targets that automatic thought, not to replace it with false positivity, but to examine whether it’s accurate and helpful.
Three CBT Techniques to Use Before Competition
1. Thought Challenging
When a negative thought appears, don’t accept it as fact. Ask yourself:
- What is the evidence for and against this thought?
- Am I catastrophising or predicting the worst-case scenario?
- What would I say to a teammate who had this thought?
The goal isn’t to tell yourself ‘everything will be fine’. It’s to arrive at a more balanced, realistic thought, one that is both honest and useful.
2. Reframing Arousal
Research in sport psychology consistently shows that how you label your physical state matters enormously. Athletes who interpret pre-competition arousal as excitement rather than anxiety tend to perform better.
Next time nerves hit, try saying to yourself: ‘I’m not anxious, I’m ready.’ This isn’t wishful thinking. It’s using your brain’s own labelling system to shift your emotional state.
3. Focus on the Controllable
This is where CBT and Stoic philosophy align most powerfully. The Stoics made a clear distinction between what is ‘up to us’ and what is not. Much of pre-competition anxiety comes from fixating on things outside our control, the opposition, the conditions, the outcome.
A simple CBT exercise: write down everything you’re worried about and sort them into two columns, ‘within my control’ and ‘outside my control’. Then direct all your mental energy toward the first column only.
Process goals, focusing on your effort, your routine, your decisions will consistently outperform outcome goals when it comes to managing anxiety and performing under pressure.
A Simple Pre-Competition Routine
Putting it together, here’s a short mental routine you can use in the hour before competition:
- Notice the nerves without judgement and name them (‘I feel anxious’ activates the rational brain).
- Challenge one negative thought using the questions above.
- Reframe your arousal: ‘This energy means I’m ready to compete’
- Identify your three controllables for the performance
- Use a grounding technique, for example slow diaphragmatic breathing for two minutes
Consistency matters more than perfection. The more you practise this routine, the more automatic it becomes and the less space anxiety has to take hold.
Final Thought
Pre-competition nerves are not a flaw in your character. They are evidence that you care about what you do. The goal is never to eliminate them, it’s to change your relationship with them.
CBT gives you the tools to do exactly that. And as Epictetus reminded us centuries ago, it has always started with one simple question: is this within my control?