How do I calm my nerves before a race or a big talk?
On this page
Two or three slow sighs right before you go, and a minute of long, slow out-breaths while you wait your turn. In through the nose, a little extra sip on top, a long breath out through the mouth. Never do fast breathing or long breath holds before you swim.
Nerves before a race or a talk feel like something to get rid of. Some of that jolt is useful, since it gets your heart and attention up for the job. What hurts is when it tips over into shaky hands, a racing heart and a blank mind. Breathing is the one handle on that you can use in a hallway with people watching.
What we’d do
Practice cyclic sighing for five minutes a day in the weeks before, so it’s automatic. On the day, take two or three sighs as you’re called up, and a minute of slow out-breaths in the wait before that. Skip anything fast or hard. A big moment is the wrong time to try a new breathing trick.
The minute before
- Breathe in through your nose until your lungs feel mostly full.
- Sip in a little more air on top.
- Let it all out slowly through your mouth, taking longer than the breath in.
- Do that two or three times. Nobody will notice, it looks like a sigh.
Your heart speeds up a little on every breath in and slows on every breath out. A long out-breath gives it longer on the slowing side, which is how the sigh takes the edge off a racing heart. It’s like letting a little air out of a tire that’s been pumped too hard. You still want air in it, just not so much that it bounces.
Why not fast breathing to psych up?
Fast, deep breathing pushes you the other way. In a 2014 study of the Wim Hof method, the breathing alone sent adrenaline up in the trained men before anything else happened. That’s the opposite of what you want before a speech, and a racing heart is the part you’re trying to settle.
Before you swim
Some swimmers breathe hard before going under to stretch their breath hold, and it has killed people. Fast breathing drops your carbon dioxide, which is what tells you to come up for air, while your oxygen keeps falling. A CDC report on New York from 1988 to 2011 found 16 people who blacked out underwater from breath holding, and 4 died. All four who died were advanced or expert swimmers aged 17 to 22 who had hyperventilated on purpose. The Wim Hof method’s own safety page says never to do its exercises before or during swimming or diving.
Before a race on land
The same sighs work at a start line. If you warm up hard, your breathing will already be up, and that’s fine. Use the sighs in the last minute to settle your heart. The best tested daily pattern for calm is cyclic sighing, which was the only pattern in the 2023 Stanford trial that clearly beat meditation on mood. Your personalized guide has a big moment option that builds a few weeks around it.
5 sources
- Balban MY et al., Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal, Cell Reports Medicine, 2023pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Kox M et al., Voluntary activation of the sympathetic nervous system and attenuation of the innate immune response in humans, PNAS, 2014pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Boyd C et al., Notes from the field: hazardous breath-holding behaviors, New York, 1988 to 2011, MMWR, 2015cdc.gov
- Shaffer F, Meehan ZM, A practical guide to resonance frequency assessment for heart rate variability biofeedback, Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2020pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Wim Hof Method, Safety warnings, checked 2026-11-14wimhofmethod.com
