Nervous: What to do if you are nervous

There are all kinds of moments in your life when you might feel nervous about what’s to come. It’s perfectly normal to feel nervous from time to time—like when you have to give a presentation , perform with your band for the first time, or do stand-up comedy. But there may be more going on if you’re consistently nervous at other times as well.

In this blog article, we take a closer look at nervousness, its causes and what you can do about it.

Always nervous

If you are always nervous, you actually suffer from chronic anxiety. This is not at all helpful. In fact, this can have all kinds of physical and mental consequences for you. Almost 1 in 5 people suffer from this anxiety.

Physically, always being nervous can lead to high blood pressure and even deadly problems in your veins. This is partly because your reaction when something actually stressful happens is even greater than in people who are otherwise not so nervous[1].

In addition, you may be more prone to hyperventilating if you’re always nervous. When you notice this happening, you may also have even more negative thoughts about it[2].

Mentally, being always nervous and anxious can contribute to the development of depression. You can recognize the stage when the always nervous turns into depression by:

1. More on panic attacks.
2. Blaming others for problems.
3. Fear of getting sick ( hypochondria).
4. More fear.
5. Insomnia.
6. Slowing down thinking and moving[3].

Because chronic nervousness or chronic anxiety can cause so many problems, it is all the more important to do something about it.

For example, identifying the source of that nervousness and addressing the root cause. This is something a hypnotherapist helps people with. A meta-analysis—a type of study that synthesizes the results of multiple studies—also shows that hypnosis is effective at reducing anxiety. This effectiveness is further enhanced when hypnotherapy is combined with other therapeutic techniques[4].

You can think about NLP or cognitive behavioral therapy, for example.

If you don’t feel like discussing your fears with a hypnotherapist, even self-hypnosis can help reduce anxiety. It does help, however, if you have a reasonable degree of suggestibility. This helps lower your blood pressure and makes you feel better. This was also confirmed by a psychological test and not just because the study participants experienced it themselves[5].

The self-hypnosis recording helped people relax and provided suggestions for looking at their problems in a different way.

Always nervous before work

You can't always be nervous either, but you can always be nervous before you go to work. So what's going on?

Interestingly enough, this can be down to work and other issues.

When it comes to work, you may feel nervous simply because the workload is very high. Factors such as performance pressure, social tensions at work, social isolation, constant worry, and anxiety also play a role in work-related nervousness[6].

The type of work you have can also cause nervousness. For example, do you have work where you work mostly with your hands? Then you often get less nervous than if you have a job with a lot of responsibility, or where you need to have certain knowledge.

For example, a CNC miller may be more nervous than someone working with a simpler piece of equipment.

Factors that contribute to nervousness before work are:

1. Leadership
2. Teach
3. Contact with people
4. Driving
5. Working with difficult equipment[7]

If you look at these studies, there may be several underlying beliefs that contribute to always feeling nervous about your work, such as beliefs about:

1. Responsibilities.
2. Performance.
3. How to deal with colleagues.
4. Whether your knowledge is good enough.

These are all beliefs that a hypnotherapist can help you address. For example, if you have fears about how well you can perform or whether you’re good enough, you may be experiencing imposter syndrome.

These problems can all be solved with hypnotherapy, because it deals with rules you once made up. With hypnotherapy, you can update those rules so that you go to work without nerves.

Then when colleagues get nasty , you can laugh about it instead of feeling on your toes. (And if it really goes too far, you laugh all the way up to the manager or HR department)

You may also feel nervous because you’ve been on long-term sick leave and are now ready to return to work—even if you’re still dealing with chronic pain. Unfortunately, chronic pain is often linked to social anxiety. That combination can make it particularly difficult to return to work.

This can reinforce each other if you have thoughts all the time about how anxious you are about your co-workers, for example, and how bad the pain can get. Fortunately, being able to ask for solutions to pain-related problems is already something that can break this unhealthy problem[8]. For example, consider arranging materials that will help you perform your work pain-free.

In such cases, it’s often the barrier of, for example, finding it difficult to ask for help or set boundaries that causes nervousness at work.

With hypnotherapy, you can get good practice in stating boundaries and indicating that you need certain help, such as an ergonomic mouse. This is something you can practice under hypnosis with visualizations. This also makes it more likely that in real life you will also ask for help when you need it, or indicate your limits. Like that you don't overwork, because prolonged work causes pain.

Nervous for vacation

Then you also have the counterpart of being nervous for work, which is precisely being nervous for your vacation.

This can become an issue at multiple times, such as during trip planning and when you actually leave for your destination.

It can be a problem if you like to be in control , which simply isn’t always the case when traveling.

So the stress can already start while planning the vacation. After all, you will also be concerned with what can go wrong and for that you will want to organize a plan B[9].

So that fear can also be about having less support at your destination than at home. For example, family and friends are not around. You fear that you won't be able to communicate well with people at the destination[10].

The cool thing is, we don't live in 1990 anymore. We now have apps and even with Google translate you can make yourself understood, others can make themselves understood to you. There are even devices that translate what you say live. So now you don't even have to learn a language other than Dutch.

With hypnosis, you can boost your self-confidence and rediscover just how self-reliant you are.

Making yourself less nervous

There are several ways to make yourself less nervous; we'll briefly cover what you can do physically and mentally.

Physical:

To instantly reduce nervousness, it is important to activate your parasympathetic nervous system. This is the part of the nerves that subconsciously causes your blood pressure to lower, your heart to beat slower and thus you are less likely to suffer from a variety of physical health issues.

To do this, you can use deep breathing and muscle relaxation[11]. These are also important steps during self-hypnosis.

You can also engage in more physical activities you enjoy, such as yoga and dancing, to reduce feelings of nervousness and anxiety[12].

Mental:

One way to reduce your nervousness is by developing your emotional intelligence. This will help you better identify the source of your nerves, understand why you feel that way, and learn how to calm yourself so that it affects you less.

This also helps against anxiety in general[13].

In addition, you can double-check your anxious thoughts. For example, are you nervous about work or a vacation, and do you have certain thoughts about it? Then ask yourself if that thought is actually true. By reframing your thoughts, you can also do a lot to reduce your anxiety[14].

A hypnotherapist also helps people here.

You can also visualize difficult situations ahead of time, so that you already think about how you will handle that situation[15]. For example, do you have difficult colleagues who make the same "jokes" over and over again? With a visualization and a plan for a good comeback, you will make sure that going to work is no longer exciting at all.

This is another way a hypnotherapist can help people.

Learn Hypnosis

Learning hypnosis can do a great deal to help yourself and others. Would you like to know exactly how hypnosis achieves the benefits mentioned in this article? Then come to a free masterclass to get started.

Or register directly for one of our events and trainings. Then you will see instant demonstrations of hypnotherapy and even during the events you will already learn some hypnosis techniques you can use to help yourself and others.

Click here for our calendar.

Click here for our training courses.

Do you have a question about our training program? Schedule a free one-on-one consultation here .

Also, pin this infographic as a reminder:

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