Your forehand just won’t go inside the court. For some reason, try as you might, during the rally, it misses off to the side, into the net, and perhaps even long consistently. When it comes to serving? Even worse. A weapon that you’re used to relying on, has now suddenly abandoned you.

“What the hell is going on?” you think. Your frenzied mind is not helping you manage your body; there’s sweatiness and an elevated heart rate—even though you’ve been doing conditioning and fitness—your chest feels heavy, and you’re not processing information as you normally do and your reactions are super slow. You, my tennis-playing friend, are probably struggling with physiological arousal.

What is “physiological arousal”? In sport psychology: It’s physiological anxiety which consists of somatic tension and autonomic hyperactivity. In simpler terms, it’s what happens when your body and muscles tense up and your autonomic nervous system goes into overdrive. This usually happens from sport psychology researchers call a threat appraisal (which I have written about before), but it may have disastrous consequences for athletes and skilled performers—especially athletes who operate skills that fall under fine motor control.

For us tennis players, yes, we do have gross motor components such as movement and sprinting, but a lot of our skills show up as moderate to fine motor control activities.

This is because it takes coordination, timing, and precision to pull off a successful serve. To be able to hit a forehand into the court, it takes the complex combination of a lot of different parts in your body: your hand, arms, and perception skills. It’s not as if you’re being asked to sprint your fastest 100 meters.

Your next question then might be: “How do I know if I’m physiologically aroused? What are the warning signs and things I should look out for in my body?” If you’re experiencing these symptoms, then you’re experiencing somatic anxiety:

Have you experienced any of these before?

I certainly have, and so have the many athletes I have helped through applied sport psychology. Which leads us to the next section…

Now that you know why your game abandons you, the larger question is how do I make sure that this doesn’t happen? Here’s what’s key to understand: you’re not experiencing these loss in level because you somehow “forgot” to play tennis…. No. Your body is simply operating in a state that interferes with the type of precision performance that you’ve consistently shown in practice.

The goal is to down-regulate. And here are a few starting points:

Now that you understand how physiological arousal impacts an athlete, and how it can be perceived as somatic anxiety, I hope you can rely on the oft applied advice of regulate your breathing.

It’s funny, because I was just talking to an athlete about how they used to think that “control your breathing” was lame and cliché advice. But after explaining to him the why… that’s when he truly bought in.

Breathing is one of the best ways of activating the parasympathetic component of your nervous system, which helps to down-regulate your autonomic hyperactivity. In simpler terms, breathing brings you down enough so that you’re in a more relaxed and composed state.

Try this next time you feel that you’re overly aroused: imagine that your lungs are made up of 3 specific compartments, from bottom to top. When you breathe in, fill in the top compartment, middle, and then all the way down to the bottom. When you breathe out, exhale out the top, the middle, and then all the way down to the bottom.

Next, notice how your body tends to react. Most players will not be aware of what’s happening to their muscles and how tense they are because your brain is constantly diverting its attention toward threats in your environment. When you’re not aware of the muscular tension that you’re carrying, this can really mess with the execution of fine motor skills.

Train yourself to stay nice and “relaxed”—even when you’re competing at 5–5 and 30–30 in the 3rd set. Notice the tightness and hardness in your hands, elbow, shoulders, neck, and even facial muscles around the mouth and the eyes.

This should help you to perform closer to how you normally do! (You’ll also find yourself getting injured less, but that’s the topic for another article!)

The problem with physiological arousal is that it often pairs with things like racing thoughts, negativity, worry, fear, and “what if?” thinking. When an athlete is experiencing these thoughts in their mind, it can steal attention away from executing… something I’ve recently been calling “task-oriented thoughts.” Because, when the rubber hits the road and when the ball is coming at you, you want to only be thinking about how you’re executing and where you’re putting the ball.

Learn to use self-talk cues to direct attention towards tactics and execution—as opposed to wasting your valuable cognitive bandwidth on worries and fears. You’ll also find that reducing your physiological arousal will help you to direct your attention a lot more precisely.

Finally, start to understand that these symptoms—or how they show up in your body—are only so “negative” because you’re partly reacting to them in that way. In other words, start to see them as signs that your body is preparing for battle, to compete, and to help you track down that fuzzy yellow ball and play your best tennis.

Consistent research in sport psychology suggests that there is a large interpretive element to the experience of physiological arousal—if you start to change the lenses through which you see what’s happening in your body, it can also help you manage it a little better. Example: you’re up 4–3, 40–15, trying to get a break. Instead of thinking that your heart racing and growing tension in your chest is a sign of impending doom, view it as your body trying to help you to close out this crucial break.

It may sound silly, but appraisal—or how we see things—has a large impact on our mental performance.

To summarize, physiological arousal can wreak havoc on fine and moderate motor control activities such as hitting tennis strokes. The serve, and playing tennis, are complex enough without you having to battle your body as well!

But all of this is trainable, and I’ve given you a launching pad on how you should be reacting and responding when you’re experiencing negative symptoms as somatic anxiety.

The more you’re able to regulate your body—and I would say physiological arousal control is one of the most important skills that athletes can employ—the more you’ll feel comfortable and confident when it really counts.