Anxiety & Excitement

Did you know that anxiety and excitement are basically the same state of mind? They're both states of "high activation" according to a Harvard research study, with the difference being that anxiety is when we imagine a future where everything goes wrong, and excitement is when we focus on the things that could go right. According to the study, when we feel anxiety, it’s easier to try to shift our worries into excitement as opposed to trying to calm ourselves down, since anxiety and excitement are so similar.

I read this study and tried to apply its ideas to myself. While I don’t think it is easily applied to the generalized anxiety that I (and many of us, likely) feel fairly consistently due to the overwhelming strain of being alive in 2022, it did have some practical implications for more concrete feelings of worry. Take for instance speaking to a crowd, an activity that can, even 25 years into my professional career, give me some jitters. Faced with an audience of a few hundred, I gave the Harvard study guidelines a shot and told myself I’m excited to be here. I’m excited about what I have to share and it’s going to be cool to tell these folks about it. In effect, I psyched myself up instead of trying to calm myself down.

And, I have to say, it worked a bit better than trying to soothe my nerves. It felt like I was working with my body and brain, instead of against it, and it made sense of my elevated heart rate and slightly too-fast speech. I wasn’t nervous, I was excited. . . and that was honestly easier to work with.

This tip likely isn’t a cure-all for all the sources of stress in my life, or yours, but in certain instances, I find that it can help to keep the positives — the things that could go right— in mind. It can be impossible to soothe yourself when you’re amped up, but you can find some power in that extra energy!

Side note to Harvard: Now, please work on channeling nighttime anxiety into something useful and hopefully soporific.