How to calm down before something exciting?

Be prepared. You're less likely to freeze up if you're well prepared. Rehearse as much as you can and practice — alone or in front of others — at every opportunity. Practice until you feel relaxed and ready. Nothing calms nerves like the confidence that comes from knowing you're prepared. Instead of dwelling on what could go wrong, rev up some positive energy. Tell yourself, I got this! I'm ready to do this — here goes! or, This is going to be fun! Learn ways to chill. Find out what technique works for you, then make a plan to use it in the downtime before a big performance. Some people take along inspirational photos, put together a playlist to help them relax, or learn yoga and breathing techniques to help them feel calm. You'll look and feel your best if you get enough sleep and eat healthy meals before your performance. Exercise can also help you feel good, and along with sleep and nutrition, is an excellent way of keeping those stress hormones from getting out of control. Smiling Breath This breathing exercise can help you lift stress or switch from a difficult mood to a more positive one. Finger Count Breathing Finger count breathing is a good way to slow down and hit your internal “pause” button. Belly Breathing When we’re relaxed, air naturally flows deeper into our lungs. Practicing belly breathing can help you create these feelings of relaxation and calm.

It can be experienced as a sense of restlessness, as a sense of kind of almost intensity in the body, and in the mind, of course. So the feeling can kind of change, you know, there's a, it's a nervous kind of excitement even, and one person will experience it as pure anxiety, and they'll bail out of the last minute and say, no, thanks, it's not for me. We tend to chase after it. We tend to be happy kind of chasing after those thoughts and being involved in that conversation in our own mind whereas with anxiety, of course, we tend not to like the feeling so much. It's not such a positive association, and so, we tend to kind of resist the thoughts a little more, but either way, whether we're chasing after thoughts or resisting thoughts, we're still creating more chatter in the mind, and that chatter is preventing the mind from calming down. So as much as possible, once we've seen that tendency to kind of, even if it's excited about sitting down and doing something for the very first time or because you haven't done it for a long time, still just recognizing that getting caught up in that conversation, and excitement has to be driven by a conversation, at some, in the mind, you know. So at some stage there has been a thought or a chain of thoughts which has created or stimulated that feeling of excitement and it's only sustained kind of by giving it more attention. So as soon as we've seen that and we've let go of it and we've come back, of course, absolutely fine just to sit there and to experience the feeling of excitement, to be present with it, to enjoy it, but not to encourage it. And I think when we do that, when we approach excitement in that way, then not only does the mind start to calm down a little bit, but it calms down with a sense of sort of happiness and joy.