How tennis players manage nerves and intrusive thoughts with milestones on the line

PARIS — On Monday at the French Open, fans on Court Philippe-Chatrier received an unexpected message from the clay below.

“I almost s— my pants,” men’s quarterfinalist Flavio Cobolli said, after the 24-year-old Italian’s fourth-round win over American Zachary Svajda became more complicated than he, or the crowd, had expected.

Cobolli led Svajda 6-2, 6-3, 6-7(3), 5-2 when his body started to betray him. Groundstrokes started flying long. His serves slowed down. His feet no longer moved to the places he asked them to. Cobolli lost four games in a row before holding serve to stay in the fourth set and then edging over the line, and into the Roland Garros quarterfinals, in a tiebreak.

“When the match is almost done, you start to think,” Cobolli said in a news conference. “That’s the problem with my character, because I don’t like to think.”

Overthinking — and underwear anxiety — is not the only way tennis players experience nerves. They describe wanting to throw up, hands shaking, upper body tensing, shoulders rising. These responses bleed into their tennis. Their reactions become too quick or too slow; their limbs become heavy, the racket weighing in their hands. Spraying forehands, service yips and stuttering footwork ensue.

At this year’s French Open, the air is particularly thick with tension. After a tournament of shocks and upsets, only five top-10 seeds and one Grand Slam champion are left across the men’s and women’s draws. The stakes always get higher deeper into a tournament, but the openness of this year’s draw further complicates matters.

Lower-ranked players are facing unusual situations with less formidable foes in their way, and with that comes expectation. A less foreboding draw might look easier, but when a golden opportunity arises, the voices inside players’ heads get louder. Such a situation can be even more difficult to handle than facing an indomitable champion on the other side of the net.

“If I think, especially if I’m nervous, I start to play different tennis,” Cobolli said.

The physiology of nerves, and how they affect tennis players and other athletes, starts in the brain: the organ that detects threats.

“We are responding to threats in the same way as when we were just about to be eaten by a woolly mammoth thousands of years ago,” sports psychologist Sarah Murray said during a phone interview.

The state of play at this year’s French Open is tied to a pressure dynamic fundamental to tennis. Being the underdog and the top dog is part of every sport, but in tennis, the status is not fixed. Its scoring system, and the lack of a clock, means players have to consistently play from behind and ahead, as well as account for their overall expectations for a match.

The underdog plays with the psychological handbrake off. As a result, Murray, who has worked with Premier League and international soccer players, said their brain is clearer and makes better decisions in the moment, without “fortune-telling” about what might come or what might have happened.

The lowest-ranked player left, women’s world No. 114 Maja Chwalińska, is channeling that mindset. “I’m an underdog, no one really knows me,” the Polish 24-year-old said in a news conference after reaching the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam for the first time.

The top dogs, or favorites, are expected to succeed. This can often lead to what Murray calls “thinking traps”: phrases including “have to,” “should” and “must.” While a player is playing a point, their brain might start to say: “I could land myself a place in the semifinal for the first time ever.” Such thoughts clutter the mind, which brings less clarity in the moment and prevents them from playing each point on its own terms.

At this French Open, many underdogs have unexpectedly become top dogs. This can lead to a mismatch between expectations and the players’ skills to manage them.

The brain influences the body’s response to nerves as much as that of the mind. Two systems work in tandem. The sympathetic nervous system, colloquially known as fight-or-flight, releases hormones and engages nerves quickly and broadly; the parasympathetic nervous system, referred to as rest-and-digest, is slower and more targeted.

The former increases excitability and preparedness for movement in response to the tennis equivalent of being assailed by a woolly mammoth. Queue “a whole cascade of events,” said Dr. Montana Jackson, specialist in sport, exercise and musculoskeletal medicine, in a voice note.

Glucose is released into the bloodstream to provide energy, and blood vessels dilate and increase flow to muscles. Adrenaline and noradrenaline, hormones which increase alertness and reaction speed, are also released, but there is a fine balance between readiness and unreadiness.

A significant increase in muscle activation can lead to tension and tremors, and in a sport like tennis, which requires fine motor skills and precision, that can be difficult to control. Increased muscle activation also increases energy expenditure, which can lead to a feeling of heaviness.

Brain activity also increases during a stress response, making movements which are usually automatic less so, and perhaps even slower. In turn, under physical stress, intensified breathing can cause carbon dioxide in the blood to drop too low, which also causes fatigue and weakness.

The stress response can also cause discomfort in the stomach. Adrenaline speeds up peristalsis, the contractions and constrictions of the intestines, while blood is diverted from the digestive system, which can cause nausea.

Then there is the gut-brain axis, which sends biochemical messages between the nervous system and the gastrointestinal tract. The mind starts to affect the body; the body starts to affect the mind. A vicious cycle ensues, which, as Cobolli found out, can have unpleasant-feeling consequences.

At the beginning of his career, two-time Grand Slam doubles champion Harri Heliövaara lost his first 10 Davis Cup ties. “I couldn’t handle the nerves,” he said during an interview at Roland Garros. “Recently, I’ve won almost all of them.”

But the jitters do not go away. The world No. 4 said he feels nerves predominantly in his diaphragm, the most important muscle for breathing. “That’s where it all starts,” he said. “It’s like a big bubble of air that just does not want to get out of my system. I want to breathe it out, but it just doesn’t go away.”

The stop-start nature of tennis makes breathing regulation critical for the players. Pauses present not only a greater risk of intrusive thoughts, but also a greater opportunity to recalibrate after the hyper-arousal state of playing a point at full intensity, or experiencing the emotional high or low of winning a set or having their serve broken.

Breathwork coach Nedas, who has worked with some of England’s top men’s Premier League players, encourages athletes to build a solid breathing practice away from playing so they can tap into it more easily in stressful situations.

“Thoughts will come,” she said, so the difference-maker is how quickly athletes can remove them from their minds and, in Nedas’ words, be an “emotional ninja.” Such adaptability to a high-stress environment is crucial to success. “If they don’t know how to keep their mind state in check, there’s a missing piece,” she said.

That’s precisely what Heliövaara, the 36-year-old Fin who hired a breathwork coach last year, did. He has also used it to complement another of his mindset approaches: microactions, sometimes of a slightly strange kind.

After his 2024 maiden Wimbledon triumph, with Britain’s Henry Patten, Heliövaara’s coach told him he looked like a “psychopath” — because he was smiling so much.

“It tells my body everything is OK,” he said. An intentional shift in physiology, whether it relates to body language, facial expression or even unclenching a fist, can alter an athlete’s emotional state.

Before a potentially career-defining match, Murray helps athletes identify the source of a narrative. “Usually it’s ourselves,” she said. Such stories, often not true, can be unhelpful.

“The game of tennis does not change,” Murray said. “It’s the perception of the game.”

The first step is recognising the story, then using a mantra or cue to let it go. Some players consciously clench their fists when thoughts such as, “If I lose this set, my chance is gone,” arise and then unclench, a reminder not to cling to imagined outcomes.

As the players left in this French Open head into their tournament-defining matchups, they will all be trying to follow Cobolli’s mantra for the rest of it — which he expressed right after he held back his nerves just in time.

“It’s my first time, and the experience is not high. Sometimes you have to pass this moment to have a better chance to improve in the next one.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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