In 2010, Jeremy Jamieson and colleagues at Harvard gave students one sentence before a practice GRE. The sentence said that the arousal they felt, the faster heart and the tightness, would help them do well. Nothing else changed.
The group that heard it outscored the control group on the math section that day, and when the researchers checked the students' real GRE results one to three months later, the advantage was still there.
Two years later, the same lab measured what the sentence does to the body. People who relabelled their arousal before a stressful task showed the cardiovascular profile of challenge rather than threat: more blood pumped per minute, less constriction in the vessels. The heart rate was the same in both groups. Only the mental framing behind it was different.
Alison Wood Brooks at Harvard Business School then ran the version easiest to picture. Before karaoke, a speech, and a timed math test, participants said "I am calm" or "I am excited" out loud. The excited group sang more accurately, spoke more persuasively, and scored higher. Saying "calm" produced no measurable benefit.
This issue explains why the label matters so much, what it looks like on a tennis court (any sport) and in a boardroom, and ends with a five-minute version you can run before your next high-stakes moment.
Why I'm writing this
I spent years around elite athletes before I trained in psychology, and tennis taught me something the textbooks later confirmed. A player on the practice court in the morning and the same player walking out for a match in the afternoon have almost identical heart rates.
The body prepares for both. What differs is the sentence the player attaches to the feeling. On the practice court, the feeling is energy. On the match court, for the players who struggle, the same feeling becomes a sign that something is wrong.
The mechanism, in simple terms
Before anything that matters, the body sends one signal. It has no label. The label comes from the part of you that interprets, and it has two options.
-> Threat sends resources to survival: vessels constrict, attention narrows to the danger, working memory shrinks so that the prepared speech becomes hard to find.
-> Under the readiness label, the same arousal goes toward the task instead. Blood flow stays open, attention stays wide enough to read the room, and the preparation is available when you reach for it.
The signal is identical in both cases. Executives who conclude they are "bad under pressure" have usually read a readiness signal as a threat signal for years, and each reading trains the next.
Two examples
Example #1: A CEO walks toward an earnings call. Heart rate rising, hands slightly cool, a familiar tightness under the ribs. Her first thought is that the nerves are a problem to be solved before the call starts, so she spends the final minutes trying to calm down. The body does not calm down on a three-minute deadline. She walks in having failed at the first task she set herself.
Example #2: An ATP tour player walks toward the first tee with the same physiology. He has a different sentence ready, one he has rehearsed. The energy is the body loading for the shot. He has learned to expect it, and its arrival tells him he is prepared. It's the same signal, but with a different label.
The Relabel: five minutes before the moment
Run this in the last 15 minutes before anything that matters. Standing or sitting, eyes open or closed.
1. Notice (one minute). Find the three strongest physical signals. Heart, breath, hands are the usual three.
Name each one plainly and without judgment, as if reporting weather.
2. Relabel (one minute). Say, under your breath or out loud, "This is my body getting ready." Then, three times: "I'm excited." Brooks used those exact words, and their plainness is part of why they work.
3. One notch (one minute). Three breaths, four counts in, six counts out. The aim is one notch down, not calm. Calm is the wrong target - it's too far away, and the pursuit of it reads to the body as confirmation that something was wrong.
4. Rehearse with the energy present (90 sec). Eyes closed. Run the first thirty seconds of the moment with the arousal still in your body. See yourself using it: the first sentence delivered with that energy behind it or the first serve with that charge in the hands.
5. Anchor (thirty seconds). On the final exhale, press thumb to index finger. That pressure becomes a portable cue. In the corridor, on the walk to a match, use it once, and the rehearsed state comes with it. Clients who learn this in session do it in a hypnotic state the first few times, which is why it installs quickly.
The version above is the self-help form. It works. The clinical form works faster.
What's the takeaway?
Your body will produce the same signal before every important moment for the rest of your career. The signal is fixed. The label is yours to choose, so decide it in advance and rehearse it until the decision runs on its own.
Before you go. The Pre-Performance Reset is a free 10-minute audio protocol built on the same clinical methods as this issue. I made it for the moments before the moment, and clients use it just as often to close a day. One email, no sequence you didn't ask for.
Get it free: nicolasullah.com/free-audio
A single, carefully chosen idea on mental discipline under pressure — delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning. Written by a CBH practitioner with an MSc in Psychology who works with elite athletes.
