Have you ever noticed when you tell yourself to “calm down” when you’re anxious about an upcoming event, you end up getting more anxious? What we resist persists, and I’ve found that a better way of dealing with it is to channel it rather than trying to bury it.
There is a technique called “anxiety reappraisal” which simply involves looking at your “anxiety” as “excitement”, rather than something to be avoided. Not only is it much easier to switch the brain from one high-arousal state to another, rather than to a low-arousal state, but it’s actually much more productive.
This might sound too good to be true, but there’s a tonne of research to back it up. In three different studies at the Harvard Business School, participants were asked to say out loud either “I am excited”, “I am nervous”, or nothing before either a maths quiz, a two-minute public speaking exercise, or a song rendition. In all three studies, the participants who declared “I’m excited” outperformed the other two groups (Brooks, 2014).
When I was in year nine, I was asked to prepare and deliver a presentation in front of the class for six minutes. I typed this entire thing out, rehearsed in front of the mirror, and timed it many times over. Then, when I got up to speak, in front of the exact same students I had spent the past three years with and whom had no trouble interrupting in class, something interesting happened. My face went red. My chest went tight. My hands, gripping the printed page I was reading verbatim, began to tremble noticeably. I raced through this presentation in half the allocated time, sat down, and wondered what the hell just happened. Does this sound familiar?
Over the years, I’ve tried all manner of exercises, rituals, and even medication to calm down during times I knew I’d be anxious, and I’ve noticed a couple of really interesting things happen. Either my attempts to “calm down” make the anxiety worse, or they actually do work and I don’t have the energy I need. What I’ve found is that this entire time, I was asking entirely the wrong question. The real question is not “how do I calm my nerves?”, but rather “how can this nervousness serve me?”. We feel whatever we feel for a reason, and the nervous energy flowing through me in that moment is there for a reason.
The stress response we feel in the face of almost every day-to-day situation is an outdated “fight-or-flight” response from prehistoric times when a threat literally meant life or death - it gave us the energy to run or fight in the face of enemies or predators. Very few things we face in the modern age are truly life threatening, yet our amygdala hasn’t caught up to this reality. Learning to look at nerve-provoking situations through an “opportunity mindset” rather than a “threat mindset” is the key – rather than considering all the things that could go wrong, focus on everything that could go well.
The reframe is simple - next time you feel nervous, just say out loud "I am excited" until you actually feel it. Granted, there are exceptions to this. Plenty of situations in life occur where asking yourself to get “excited” about them is a bit patronising, and if you’re feeling such intense anxiety on a regular basis that it stops you from living a manageable life, then you would be better served speaking to a professional. But where you can, try to reframe your anxiety as excitement and learn to love it.
References
1. Brooks, A.W. (2014). Get excited: Reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement. Journal of Experimental Psychology. 143(3). 1144-1158.
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