Under pressure, breathing moves high into the chest and stops refilling properly between sentences. That single change causes most of what people describe as nerves: the voice thins because there isn’t enough air behind it, the pace increases because you’re racing to finish before the air runs out, and thinking gets harder, because over-breathing lowers carbon dioxide, and low CO₂ narrows the blood vessels feeding the brain and reduces the flow through them (Willie et al., 2014). That’s the physical cause of a mind going blank. It isn’t a failure of nerve.
The fix is not “breathe deeply,” which is vague enough to be useless under pressure. It’s a specific physical position, practised somewhere calm so it’s available somewhere stressful.
Try this now. Sit or stand normally, put one hand flat on your stomach, and breathe so that the hand moves outward on the in-breath. Most people, on the first attempt, breathe so that their shoulders rise instead. That’s the pattern to unlearn. Do ten slow breaths this way, hand on stomach, shoulders still.
Practise this for two minutes a day, always somewhere calm: at a desk, not on a stage. The point of rehearsal is to make the correct pattern automatic enough that it survives contact with an actual room, which is exactly what lesson eleven will test.
