Why Do Palms Get Sweaty When Nervous

General information only: this article explains why palms get sweaty when you feel nervous. It is general information, not individual advice. For personal questions, a qualified health professional is the right person to ask.

Almost everyone knows the feeling. You are about to shake hands with someone new, or walk into an exam hall, or stand up to speak in front of a room, and your palms turn damp. Your hands feel cold and wet at the same time, the paper in your fingers starts to soften, and the harder you try to ignore it, the worse it seems to get. It is embarrassing, it is uncomfortable, and it feels as if your body has betrayed you at exactly the wrong moment. Yet it is one of the most normal things the human body does. Sweaty palms under stress are not a sign that something is wrong with you. They are a sign that an old alarm system inside you is working exactly as it was built to work, even though the danger it is preparing you for is a job interview rather than a wild animal.

To understand it, you have to start with a simple fact: sweating is not only about cooling down. Most of us think of sweat as the body’s way of dealing with heat. You walk in the sun, your body warms up, and sweat cools your skin as it dries. That is true, and it is the main job of most sweat glands. But the palms of your hands, and the soles of your feet, play by different rules. The sweat glands there respond far more to emotion than to temperature. They switch on when you feel nervous, excited, embarrassed or afraid, even in a cool room. That is why your palms can be dripping on a cold morning before an exam, while the rest of your body feels perfectly dry.

This article explains the whole chain in plain words: what the glands in your palms actually do, how the brain sends them the signal, why the reaction is so fast, why some people sweat far more than others, and what usually helps in the moment. None of it is a mystery once you see the pieces together, and none of it means your body is broken. It means your body is alert, and alertness has a price, and the price is often paid in damp hands.

What the Sweat Glands in Your Palms Actually Do

Your skin is covered with millions of tiny sweat glands, and they come in two main kinds. The most common kind, found almost everywhere on your body, makes watery sweat to cool you down when you are hot. The glands in your palms belong mostly to a different pattern of control, even though they make the same watery sweat. They are packed very tightly together. The palm of one hand holds hundreds of sweat glands in every square centimetre, far more than the skin on your back or your arm. That density is the first reason a little nervousness shows up so clearly on your hands. A small signal reaches a huge number of glands at once, and the result is easy to feel and easy to see.

The sweat itself is mostly water, with a small amount of salt and other substances dissolved in it. It has no smell when it first appears. The smell people associate with sweat comes later, when bacteria on the skin act on it, and that happens mainly in places like the armpits. Palm sweat is usually odourless. It is simply wet. That wetness has a purpose, or at least it once did. In our distant past, damp hands gave a better grip. A slightly moist palm holds a branch, a stone tool or a rough surface more firmly than a bone-dry one. The same is true today if you watch a gymnast rub chalk on her hands or a climber test a hold: a little moisture improves grip, too much makes it worse. The body, preparing you to act, makes your palms ready to hold on to something. It does not know that what you are about to hold is a pen or another person’s hand.

There is another old idea that sweating palms helped early humans run or climb away from danger, because damp feet gripped the ground better too, which is why the soles of the feet behave in the same way. Whether or not that is the exact reason, the pattern is clear: hands and feet are the parts of the body that touch the world, and they are the parts that get ready first when the brain thinks action may be needed. Your palms do not sweat because they are hot. They sweat because they are being prepared.

The Stress Alarm: How Your Brain Switches Them On

The switch is in the brain, and it works through a system most people have heard of but rarely picture clearly. Deep inside the brain sits a small almond-shaped part called the amygdala, which acts like a smoke alarm. It watches for anything that might be a threat: a sudden noise, an angry face, a memory of a bad experience, or the thought of an exam tomorrow. When it decides something matters, it sends an alarm signal to other parts of the brain, and one of those parts sets off the body’s stress response. This is the same system that makes your heart beat faster and your breathing quicken. Sweaty palms are one small part of that same alarm going off.

The signal travels through nerves that belong to the sympathetic nervous system, which is the branch of the nervous system that prepares the body for action. The word sympathetic is misleading; it has nothing to do with kindness. It is the “get ready” branch. Its opposite, the parasympathetic system, is the “rest and digest” branch, which takes over when you are calm, eating, or falling asleep. When the alarm sounds, the get-ready branch takes charge. It tells the heart to pump harder, it sends blood towards the muscles, it widens the pupils so you can see more, and it tells the sweat glands in the palms and soles to open up. All of this happens without you thinking about it, and without you being able to stop it by willpower alone.

This is why telling yourself to calm down rarely dries your hands on the spot. The signal is not coming from your conscious thoughts. It is coming from a deeper, faster part of the brain that reacts before your thinking mind has finished its sentence. You can learn to influence it over time, through breathing, practice and experience, but in the moment of the alarm, the body has already acted. That is not a failure of self-control. It is how the system is designed: fast first, thoughtful second. A slow system would be useless in real danger, and the price of a fast system is that it sometimes fires when the danger is only a speech.

Why Palms and Feet Sweat More Than Other Skin

If the stress alarm went to every sweat gland equally, your whole body would turn damp every time you felt nervous. It does not, and the reason is that different glands listen to different signals. The glands on your back, chest and forehead are mainly temperature glands. They listen mostly to heat. The glands on your palms and soles listen mostly to emotion. Scientists call this difference emotional sweating, as opposed to thermal sweating, and it is a real, measurable split. Put a person in a hot room and their back sweats. Put the same person in a cool room and ask them to solve a hard maths problem under time pressure, and their palms sweat while their back stays dry.

The wiring explains the difference. The nerves that control palm sweating are part of the sympathetic system, and they are unusually sensitive to emotional signals from the brain. The glands on the rest of the body are controlled more by the part of the brain that measures temperature. Both sets of glands use the same chemical messenger, a substance called acetylcholine, to receive their orders, which is a small detail that matters only because it shows how the body reuses the same tools for different jobs. The message is the same; the senders are different. Heat sends one message. Fear sends another. Your palms are tuned to the second one.

That is also why sweaty palms so often come with cold hands. When the stress alarm sounds, blood vessels in the hands narrow slightly, sending blood towards the large muscles of the arms and legs, which the body thinks it may need for running or fighting. Less warm blood in the hands means the hands feel cooler, even while the sweat glands are working hard. Cold and damp together is the classic feeling of nervous hands, and it is not a contradiction. It is two parts of the same alarm: blood moving away, sweat moving out. Once you know that, the feeling makes sense instead of feeling like a strange fault.

Adrenaline, Nerves and the Speed of the Reaction

One reason the reaction is so fast is a chemical called adrenaline, which most people know by name. When the alarm sounds, the adrenal glands, two small glands that sit on top of the kidneys, release adrenaline into the blood. Adrenaline spreads through the body in seconds, and it sharpens everything: the heart beats faster, the airways open wider, the liver releases stored sugar into the blood for quick energy, and the senses become more alert. The sweat glands in the palms are part of this same wave. That is why your hands can go from dry to damp in the time it takes to hear your name called.

It is worth noting that adrenaline is not the only messenger. The nerves themselves carry signals directly to the glands, and those nerve signals arrive even faster than the chemical travelling in the blood. The two routes work together: the nerves give the instant order, and adrenaline keeps the body in its alert state for minutes afterwards. That is why your palms may stay damp for a while even after the worrying moment has passed. The interview question is over, but the adrenaline is still in your blood, fading slowly, and your hands take time to dry. The body does not switch off as quickly as it switches on, and that lag is normal.

This speed is also why the reaction can feel unfair. You might be a calm, capable person who knows the material perfectly, and still your hands sweat before an exam. Knowledge does not stop the alarm, because the alarm is not checking your knowledge. It is checking whether the situation matters to you. An exam matters. A first date matters. A speech matters. The more something matters, the louder the alarm, and the damper the hands. The reaction is a measure of how much you care, not of how ready you are. People who care little feel little. People who care a lot often feel it in their palms first.

Why It Happens Before Exams, Interviews and Handshakes

Certain moments bring it out more than others, and they share a pattern. Exams, interviews, speeches, first dates, performances and handshakes all have three things in common: they are judged by others, their outcome matters, and you cannot fully control them. Your brain reads that combination as a social threat, and social threats use the same alarm as physical ones. The brain is old, and it does not make a neat distinction between a tiger and a panel of interviewers. Both are situations where being judged badly could cost you something, and the body prepares in the same way for both.

Handshakes deserve a special mention, because they create a cruel loop. You worry your hands will be sweaty, that worry is itself a stress signal, the alarm fires harder, and your hands get wetter. Then you worry more about the handshake, and the loop tightens. Many people know this loop well, and it is one reason sweaty palms feel so much worse than they look. The other person usually notices far less than you think. A brief handshake is over in two seconds, and most people are thinking about their own words, not about the moisture on your palm. But from the inside, the worry can dominate the whole meeting, and the sweat feels like a public announcement of your nerves.

Exams are similar, with an extra twist. You sit still, so there is no movement to distract you, and your hands are on the desk or holding a pen, so you feel every change in them. The pen slips slightly. The paper sticks to your palm. You wipe your hands on your trousers and they dampen again within a minute. None of this affects your answers, but it steals your attention, and stolen attention feels like a real problem during an exam. It helps to know that the examiners are not grading your hands. They are grading your answers, and damp palms have never changed a single mark. The sweat is a side effect of caring about the result, and caring about the result is what got you to study in the first place.

Why Some People Sweat More Than Others

If you compare ten people in the same stressful situation, their palms will not sweat equally. One person’s hands stay nearly dry, another’s drip. Much of this difference is simply how people are built. Some people have more active sweat glands, or glands that respond more strongly to the same signal. The number of glands, their size, and how sensitive they are to nerve signals all vary from person to person, just as height and eye colour vary. Two people can feel exactly the same level of nervousness and sweat very different amounts, and neither of them is doing anything wrong.

Age and habit play a part too. Teenagers and young adults often sweat more under stress, because their stress systems are highly reactive and they face many new judged situations: exams, first jobs, first dates. With age and experience, the alarm often quiets down, not because the glands change, but because the situations stop feeling new. The tenth speech is less alarming than the first, and the tenth interview less than the first. The brain learns that these situations, while important, are not dangerous, and the alarm fires less fiercely. That is one of the quiet benefits of experience: it does not only build skill, it also calms the body.

There is also a condition in which the palms sweat heavily and often, even without any obvious stress, and it is worth naming honestly. It is called palmar hyperhidrosis, and it means the sweat glands in the hands are overactive. People with this condition can have dripping hands during ordinary activities, like holding a phone or writing, and it can interfere with daily life. It is not caused by poor hygiene or by being too nervous, and it is not something a person can fix by relaxing. It is a recognised medical condition, and health professionals have ways of assessing it and discussing options. If your palms sweat heavily most of the time, in cool weather and calm moments as well as stressful ones, that is a different picture from ordinary nervous sweating, and it is worth raising with a doctor rather than suffering in silence. This article is general information, not a diagnosis, but knowing the name of a condition is often the first step towards getting proper help.

Sweaty Palms, Cold Hands and the Shaking Feeling

Sweaty palms rarely arrive alone. They usually come with a small family of other feelings, and understanding the family helps you recognise the alarm for what it is. The heart beats faster, and you can feel it in your chest or your throat. Breathing becomes quicker and shallower. The mouth goes dry, which is the opposite of the palms, because the same alarm that opens sweat glands also slows down saliva. The stomach may feel tight or fluttery, the famous butterflies, because blood has moved away from the gut towards the muscles. The hands may tremble slightly, because adrenaline makes muscles more ready to move, and ready muscles shake a little when they have nothing to do. All of these are one alarm, not five separate problems.

The dry mouth deserves a moment, because it confuses people. Why would the body make the hands wet and the mouth dry at the same time? The answer is that different parts of the body are being prepared for different jobs. The mouth dries because digestion is being paused; the body does not need saliva when it thinks it may need to run. The hands sweat because grip is being prepared. The body is not trying to be consistent. It is trying to be ready, and readiness looks different in each part. Once you see the logic, the combination stops feeling random. It is a single plan, carried out in different places.

The shaking is similar. A small tremor in the hands under stress is extremely common, and it is not a sign of weakness. Adrenaline increases the natural tremor that every human hand has, even at rest. Hold your hand out perfectly still and you will see a tiny shake if you look closely. Under stress that tiny shake grows, because the muscles are primed and the nerves are firing faster. It settles as the adrenaline fades. The same is true of the sweating: it arrives with the alarm, it peaks with the alarm, and it fades as the alarm fades. The body returns to its resting state on its own, without any action from you, which is why the worst moments of sweaty palms are usually the first few minutes, not the whole event.

What Usually Helps in the Moment

Because the reaction comes from the alarm system, the things that help are mostly things that tell the alarm the situation is safe. Slow breathing is the best known of these, and it works for a real reason. Long, slow breaths out signal the resting branch of the nervous system to take over. A simple pattern that many people use is to breathe in for a count of four, hold for a count of four, and breathe out for a slow count of six. The long breath out matters most. Done quietly for a minute before a handshake or a speech, it does not guarantee dry hands, but it often takes the edge off the alarm, and a slightly quieter alarm means slightly drier palms. It is not a trick. It is a direct message to the system that controls the glands.

Preparation helps in a different way. The alarm fires hardest when a situation feels new and uncertain. Rehearsing a speech, practising answers for an interview, or simply arriving early and looking around the room all make the situation less new, and a less new situation is a less alarming one. This is not about being perfect. It is about giving your brain evidence that you know what is coming. Even small preparation, like holding the pen you will use or sitting in the chair you will sit in, gives the brain a sense of familiarity, and familiarity quiets the smoke alarm. That is why the second time you do something is almost always easier on the hands than the first.

There are also simple practical steps that people use, and they are worth listing plainly. Washing your hands with cool water and drying them well just before a handshake can help, because cool water lowers the skin temperature and dry skin takes a little while to dampen again. Carrying a small cloth or handkerchief gives you a discreet way to dry your palms without drawing attention. Avoiding heavy, tight gloves in warm rooms helps, because trapped heat adds thermal sweating on top of emotional sweating. Some people find that keeping their hands out of their pockets and letting air reach them helps the sweat dry faster. None of these steps stops the alarm, but they manage its effects, and managing the effects is often enough to break the worry loop. Once the loop breaks, the alarm often eases on its own.

It is also worth saying what does not help. Wiping your hands again and again in a panic, or gripping a tissue tightly for minutes, can make you focus on the sweat more, and focus feeds the alarm. Rubbing your palms together hard creates friction and heat, which can make the glands work harder. Drinking a large amount of cold water in the hope of cooling down does little for palm sweating, because palm sweating is not caused by heat. And blaming yourself, or deciding that sweaty palms mean you are a nervous person, is the least helpful response of all. Sweaty palms do not define your character. They define a moment. The same person who sweats before a speech can be perfectly steady in a crisis, because different alarms fire in different situations. Judge yourself by what you do, not by what your hands do.

One more practical point matters for daily life. If sweaty palms are a regular problem for you, notice the pattern over a week rather than judging one bad moment. Do your hands sweat mainly before judged events, or all the time? Do they sweat in cool rooms as well as warm ones? Do they interfere with writing, holding tools, or using a phone? A week’s observations give you and any health professional a much clearer picture than a single embarrassing memory. Most people will find their sweating follows stress closely, and that is reassuring in itself, because it means the cause is the alarm, and the alarm is something that can be worked with. If the pattern looks different, if the sweating is constant and heavy, that is useful information too, and it is worth sharing with a doctor.

My Take:

If you ask me what I think about sweaty palms when nervous, my answer is that it is one of the most human things the body does, and one of the most misunderstood. People treat damp hands as a sign of weakness, as if a confident person would never sweat before a speech. I think that is backwards. A confident person is not someone whose alarm never fires. A confident person is someone who has learned that the alarm fires and carries on anyway. The sweat is not the story. What you do while your hands are damp is the story, and most of the time the answer is that you shake the hand, you answer the question, you give the speech, and the hands dry a few minutes later as if nothing had happened.

I think the reason sweaty palms upset people so much is the feeling of being seen. We imagine that everyone can tell we are nervous, and that being nervous means being judged. In my view, most people are far too busy with their own nerves to examine yours. The interviewer is thinking about the next question. The audience is thinking about lunch. The person shaking your hand is thinking about their own introduction. Your palms are a small detail in a scene where everyone is the main character of their own worry. I have watched people give excellent speeches with damp hands and terrible speeches with dry ones, and the hands never predicted the result. The words did, and the preparation did, and the honesty did. The sweat predicted nothing at all.

There is also something I want to say about the loop, because the loop is the real enemy, not the sweat. You worry about sweating, so you sweat, so you worry more. I think the way out of the loop is not to fight the sweat but to stop treating it as an emergency. When I feel my own palms dampen, I try to notice it the way I would notice rain on a window: it is happening, it is not dangerous, and it will pass. That small change in attitude does more than any trick I know, because it starves the alarm of its fuel. The alarm feeds on the idea that something is wrong. Once you decide that nothing is wrong, that damp hands are simply what your body does when something matters, the alarm has less to work with, and it often quiets faster than you expect.

I also think we should be honest about how old this system is. The alarm that makes your palms sweat was built for a world where danger had teeth and claws, and where being ready to grip a branch or run could save your life. It was not built for exam halls and job interviews, and it does not know the difference. So it fires for the interview as it would have fired for the tiger, and it prepares your hands as it would have prepared them to climb. I find that oddly comforting. It means the sweating is not a fault in you. It is a feature of a very old system doing its job in a very new world. You are not broken. You are carrying an ancient alarm into a modern room, and the alarm is doing what alarms do. The task is not to remove the alarm. The task is to live with it and let it fade, which it always does.

I want to say something about the people who sweat more than others, because I think they get the worst of this. If your hands drip in ordinary situations, if you avoid handshakes, if you ruin paper when you write, that is not a small embarrassment. It is a daily difficulty, and it deserves to be taken seriously. I think too many people with heavy palm sweating suffer quietly for years, believing it is their fault or believing nothing can be done. Neither is true. There is a name for it, there are health professionals who understand it, and there are options worth discussing. I would rather someone hear that plainly than spend another year hiding their hands. Ordinary nervous sweating is common and normal. Heavy, constant sweating is a different matter, and it is worth a conversation with a doctor, not because it is dangerous, but because living with it is hard and help exists.

I also think about children and teenagers here, because they face this at an age when embarrassment feels enormous. A teenager whose palms sweat before a class presentation can decide, in one bad afternoon, that they are a nervous person, and carry that label for years. I think that label is wrong and unfair. One sweaty presentation does not make a nervous person, just as one bad match does not make a bad player. If I could say one thing to a young person about this, it would be that the sweat is a sign that the moment mattered to you, and caring about a moment is a strength, not a weakness. The students who care are the ones who prepare, and the ones who prepare are the ones who improve. The damp hands are simply the tax you pay for caring, and it is a small tax compared with what caring gives you.

There is a practical side to my view as well. I believe in the small, unglamorous steps: slow breathing before the moment, a little preparation, cool water on the hands, a handkerchief in the pocket. These are not glamorous solutions, and they will not make the problem vanish, but they are honest, and they work a little, and a little is often enough. I distrust grand promises about this, because the alarm is too old and too deep to be switched off by a single trick. What works is a combination of small things, repeated until they become habits, plus the deeper change of attitude that stops treating the sweat as a crisis. That combination is slow, and it is not exciting, but it is real, and I would rather recommend something real and slow than something exciting and false.

I think the most important thing I have learned from thinking about this is that the body is on our side, even when it embarrasses us. The sweat, the fast heartbeat, the dry mouth, the butterflies: these are not the body failing. They are the body trying to help, using tools that are older than our modern lives. The help is sometimes clumsy, and sometimes it arrives at the wrong moment, but the intention is protection, not sabotage. When I remember that, I can be kinder to my own body, and kindness turns out to be practical. A body that is treated kindly calms faster than a body that is scolded. So I try to thank the alarm rather than fight it, in a quiet way, and then get on with the thing that matters. The hands dry. The moment passes. The work remains, and the work is what counts.

So here is my final view, in plain words. Sweaty palms when nervous are normal, common, and caused by an old alarm system that prepares your hands to grip and act. They do not mean you are weak, they do not predict failure, and they fade as the alarm fades. Slow breathing, preparation and simple practical steps can take the edge off, and a change in attitude can break the worry loop that makes it worse. If your hands sweat heavily all the time, that is a different picture and worth a talk with a health professional. But for most people, most of the time, damp hands before a big moment are simply the price of caring, and caring is not something to be ashamed of. Shake the hand, answer the question, give the speech. Your hands will dry, and no one will remember the sweat. They will remember what you said and what you did.

If a friend came to me before a job interview and said their hands were sweating, I would not tell them to hide it or to be ashamed of it. I would tell them to wash their hands with cool water, dry them properly, take three slow breaths, and walk in. I would tell them that the interviewer has seen sweaty palms a thousand times, and that a damp handshake has never cost anyone a job that their answers deserved. I would tell them to focus on the first question, not on their hands, because attention is a limited thing, and every bit of it spent on the sweat is a bit taken away from the answer. The hands will dry while they are talking. The sweat is a visitor that leaves on its own. The answers are what stay in the room.

I think there is also a lesson here about the difference between being nervous and being unready. People mix the two up constantly. They feel their palms sweat and conclude that they are not ready for the exam, the speech, or the interview. But readiness is built by study and practice, and nervousness is built by caring, and the two can exist side by side in the same person. Some of the best-prepared people I can imagine have sweated before every big moment of their lives, and they went on to do the work well, because preparation and nerves are not opposites. They are companions. The sweat does not cancel the preparation. The preparation does not cancel the sweat. Both are true at once, and the person who accepts both is freer than the person who waits for the sweat to disappear before they act.

I have also thought about how this changes with practice, because practice is the one thing that reliably quiets the alarm over time. The first speech is the worst for the hands. The fifth is better. The twentieth is easier still, not because the glands have changed, but because the brain has learned that a speech is not a danger. It has collected evidence: I spoke, nothing terrible happened, I survived, I did it again. Each repetition adds a little evidence, and the alarm listens to evidence. That is why I would encourage anyone who sweats before speaking to seek out small, low-stakes chances to speak, rather than avoiding them. Avoidance feels safe, but it teaches the brain nothing, and the alarm stays loud. A small, survivable speech teaches the brain that the room is safe, and the next one is a little quieter on the hands.

I think about workplaces too, because sweaty palms can shape small daily choices in ways people do not admit. A person might avoid shaking hands at a meeting, or keep their hands in their pockets, or pass a pen to someone else rather than write on a board. These are tiny avoidances, but they add up, and over time they can make a person feel smaller than they are. I would rather see someone shake the hand anyway, damp palm and all, than shrink their working life to fit their sweat glands. The hand is a small part of who you are. Your work, your ideas, and your reliability are much larger parts, and they are the parts people remember. A colleague may notice a damp palm for two seconds. They will remember a good idea for months.

There is one more thought I want to leave here, and it is about kindness towards yourself. We are often far crueller to our own bodies than we would be to anyone else. If a friend told us their hands sweated before an exam, we would say it was normal and tell them not to worry. When it happens to us, we call ourselves weak. That double standard helps nobody. I try to speak to myself the way I would speak to a friend, and I recommend it to anyone reading this. The body that sweats before a big moment is the same body that carried you through every hard day of your life so far. It deserves a little patience, not a scolding. Treat it kindly, give it slow breaths and a little preparation, and it will usually settle. And even when it does not settle, you can still do the thing that matters, damp hands and all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do my palms get sweaty when I am nervous?

Because your brain’s stress alarm switches on the sweat glands in your palms. When you feel nervous, the sympathetic nervous system sends a signal to those glands, and adrenaline keeps the body alert. The palms have a very high number of sweat glands that respond more to emotion than to heat, so they dampen quickly even in a cool room.

Is it normal for palms to sweat when nervous?

Yes, it is very normal and very common. Almost everyone has felt damp palms before an exam, an interview, a speech or a first meeting. It is a normal part of the body’s stress response, not a sign of illness or weakness, and it usually fades a few minutes after the stressful moment passes.

Why do my palms sweat but the rest of my body stays dry?

Because the sweat glands in your palms and the soles of your feet listen mainly to emotional signals, while the glands on most of the rest of your body listen mainly to heat. In a stressful moment in a cool room, the emotional glands switch on while the temperature glands stay quiet, so your hands feel damp and the rest of you feels dry.

Why do my hands feel cold and sweaty at the same time?

Because the stress alarm does two things at once. It tells the sweat glands in your palms to open, and it narrows the blood vessels in your hands slightly, sending blood towards the large muscles. Less warm blood in the hands makes them feel cool, while the glands are working hard, so the hands feel cold and damp together.

Can sweaty palms be a medical condition?

Ordinary nervous sweating is not a medical condition. But there is a recognised condition called palmar hyperhidrosis, in which the palms sweat heavily and often, even without obvious stress or heat, and it can interfere with writing, holding things and shaking hands. If that sounds like your experience, it is worth raising with a health professional, who can assess it and discuss options.

What helps sweaty palms in the moment?

Slow breathing with a long breath out can quiet the stress alarm, and preparation for the event makes it feel less new and less alarming. Washing your hands with cool water and drying them well just before a handshake, carrying a small cloth or handkerchief, and keeping your hands out of your pockets so air can reach them all help manage the dampness. If sweating is heavy and constant, a health professional is the right person to ask about further options.

Sources

• NHS — general health information: https://www.nhs.uk/
• World Health Organization — health topics: https://www.who.int/
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — health information: https://www.cdc.gov/
• Mayo Clinic — general health information: https://www.mayoclinic.org/
• Healthline — general health information: https://www.healthline.com/