Maybe you’ve experienced it before: Your palms are sweating, your limbs feel weak or heavy, and your gut is unsettled. You’re nervous, and on the surface, you may or may not look calm and ready.

And if you haven’t experienced it yourself, maybe you’ve heard Eminem rap about it. Or Simone Biles talk about it. Or Lebron James admit that even 20-plus years into his NBA career he still gets nervous—even before regular season games. Or on a normal Tuesday. Why? Because he loves what he does and he loves that he’s still getting to do it. He welcomes the nerves: the nerves, he says, give him a sense of being present, of feeling alive.

So if you’re looking forward to a point in your athletic (or performance) career when you don’t get so nervous anymore, maybe it’s time to stop.

Because the nerves don’t go away when you’re excited about what it is you get to do. And the nerves can even help you to perform at your best.

The trickiest things about nerves may be that they help or harm us insomuch as we believe that they help or harm us. Our perception of our nervousness—as perception usually does—becomes our reality.

This can be hard to believe when you’re feeling trapped by trips to the restroom or unable to keep food down. How could you possibly perform at your best if you’re sick?

It’s a fair question. Shifting your perception about your nerves doesn’t necessarily mean your bodily state and your performance will shift right away, today. Shifting your perception of your nerves is a process that takes time and practice.

One thing that helps to begin the process of shifting your perception of your nerves is to recognize that stress is not a dirty word. Stress can even be good. In fact, there’s a term in the social and behavioral sciences called eustress, meaning literally “good stress,” the kind of stimulus we have to have for learning and growth. Without eustress, we’re either bored or coasting along in our comfort zone, and therefore not getting any better at what it is we’d like to do.

Sport psychologists have done a lot of research on “individualized zones of optimal functioning,” which is the state of activation, unique to you and unique to each task you might be required to perform, necessary for you to be able to perform at your very best. Your optimal zone of functioning is one in which you’re sufficiently stressed. You’re not bored and you are not in a comfort zone. That state of activation could vary a great deal from sport to sport and even within one sport. For example, the state of activation—your specific individualized zone of optimal functioning—that you need at the beginning of a long distance race may be different from the state of activation you need in a neck-and-neck final hundred meters. The state of activation you need for a balance beam routine may be quite different from what you need to vault. And so on.

The best way to figure out our individualized zones of optimal functioning for each task we need to perform is to give ourselves the space for trial and error. We might get it wrong sometimes. We might overshoot a little and become too activated, be a little too amped, start a little too fast. We might overshoot a lot and tilt toward shutdown. But the only way you figure out what works for you is to give yourself the space to not get it right every time. Better yet, to give yourself the space to not get it right a lot of the time. Your whole season, you hone and tweak your way toward your peak event. And then after that, you rest, reflect, and then hone and tweak your way into your next season.

That’s rarely a satisfying answer for people who want to perform their best in every game, race, match, etc. So after acknowledging the nerves—welcoming them to be present—the next important step is to notice when they start to tilt away from appropriate challenge and into fatigue or exhaustion before fatigue and exhaustion become sickness, shutdown, or panic.

You can recover from fatigue brought on by nerves if you’re able to recognize that the nerves are fatiguing you. When you notice, you might try star NFL receiver George Kittle’s trick and install a “reset button” on yourself. For Kittle, he presses his forearm (where he has an image of the Joker with bright red lips) to remind himself to come back to what he can control right here, right now. Sometimes, the only thing he can control (and the only thing any of us can control) is our breathing.

This is not to say “just breathe,” because that’s rarely helpful advice. But you could become aware of the length of your exhale, maybe breathing out a little bit longer than you breathe in, and allowing your in-breath to occur naturally, without forcing it. Or you could do what Kittle does and give yourself a mantra, for example: Breathe in confidence as you inhale, and breathe out fear when you exhale. You may choose different words. The key, again, is to give yourself space for trial and error. You might not get it right on the first try (or the 10th, or the 20th…).

But if you love what you do and you want to keep getting better at doing it, allow yourself to find out what you need to befriend your nerves.