When you’re anxious, your body behaves in certain ways. Maybe your stomach is in knots and you start to sweat. You might feel a little bit shaky, and your breathing tends to be faster. You feel a lot of these same symptoms when you’re excited about something, and that’s the trick. Some people find it easier to get excited about what’s making them anxious than to calm the physical symptoms of anxiety.
Next time you’re feeling nervous, try telling yourself that you’re actually just excited. It just might work. The technique is called “anxious reappraisal,” and while it may sound like you’re lying to yourself, there’s good evidence that it actually works.
A series of studies seem to show that this is pretty effective. One recent study looked specifically at performance anxiety. Harvard Business School’s Alison Wood Brooks had participants perform karaoke, do public speaking and perform a math problem. Before each person did the task, she had them say they were nervous, excited or say nothing at all. The group who said, “I am excited” performed better than the nervous group or the control group.
In the paper she published, Brooks says, “Compared with those who attempt to calm down, individuals who reappraise their anxious arousal as excitement feel more excited and perform better.” And all they had to do was say the words, “I am excited.”
The people in the excited group weren’t less anxious. They’d just transferred that negative emotion to a positive one, and they subsequently killed it at karaoke.
This doesn’t just work for curbing performance anxiety. Last year, a study published in the Journal of Marketing Research found that people felt less pressed for time when they told themselves they were excited about their to-do lists. A 2010 study found that anxious reappraisal helped people perform better on the math section of the GRE. It seems like this method could have applications across even more anxiety-inducing situations.
In a recent interview in The Atlantic, Olga Khazan asked Brooks if just saying “I’m so excited” could be oversimplifying things a bit. Surely, this trick couldn’t work for everyone. Brooks says that when it comes to anxious reappraisal, practice makes perfect. She also suggested that if just saying the words doesn’t help you, you might make a list of the possible positive outcomes to help get yourself excited.
I ran across this Atlantic article just a few days after reading another piece on coping with performance anxiety. In that article, TED Talk organizer Chris Anderson shared a different technique for coping with anxiety during public speaking: confess.
Anderson told Business Insider that audiences want speakers to do a great job. “If you actually go on stage and you’re still feeling nervous,” Anderson explains, “it’s okay just to tell the audience that. Audiences like honesty; they will actually embrace people.”
So, what’s the best way to deal with anxiety? Every person is different. A technique that works for the majority of people in a study—or even in a series of studies—may not work for you. The techniques above are like a bag of tricks you can reach into when anxiety-inducing situations arise. Of course, if your anxiety is truly crippling—interfering with your job or your personal relationships—it might be time to stop googling the problem and talk to a professional.
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