the.com/nervous
a body believing the meeting is a lion and acting accordingly
means feeling anxious, tense, or easily agitated, often with a physical edge of jitters or unease.
from From Latin nervosus, 'sinewy, full of nerves,' from nervus, 'sinew, tendon, nerve' — itself a cousin of Greek neuron, 'sinew.' For centuries 'nervous' actually meant strong and vigorous (full of sinew); only later, as 'nerves' came to mean the body's wiring and the seat of agitation, did the word swing toward its modern jittery sense — strength of fiber giving way to fragility of feeling.
- word origin
- Latin nervus meant sinew, not jitters
- gut wiring
- stomach has its own 500-million-neuron nervous system
- shared signal
- same chemicals fire for terror and excitement
- performance edge
- moderate nerves measurably sharpen focus and reaction time
for instance
tennis players at wimbledon — documented phenomenon of top-seeded players underperforming in early rounds due to pressure