What This Harvard Study Found About Anxiety
Can you turn anxiety into a different emotion? Keep reading to find out what this Harvard study observed in those who appraised their anxiety in a different way
A Harvard study set out to investigate whether reappraising performance anxiety as excitement can actually alter our feelings of anxiety and affect how we perform.
This study was important because many individuals suffer from performance anxiety before public speaking events, meetings, and job interviews. Anxiety can drain our working memory capacity, decrease self-confidence, and lead to poor performance outcomes.
The typical response to anxiety is to tell ourselves, or the person experiencing it, to simply “calm down,” but this rarely helpful. When we experience anxiety our nervous system shifts into a sympathetic “fight or flight” response, and our anxious energy needs someplace to go. Biologist Robert Sapolsky wrote a famous book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, that wonderfully explains this concept. In short, when animals experience stressors they utilize their nervous system’s stress response to flee the problem, thus expelling the energy their body produced to fight the stressor. However, humans tend to experience long-term psychological stressors in which our bodies respond to an emotional or psychological stressor the same way we would a physical stressor, but instead of engaging in movement to expel the stress or cognitively reappraise the “stressor” and feelings that follow, we typically try to talk ourselves out of the stressor, ruminate on our thoughts, or stay put.
Interestingly, a Harvard research study found that we may not need to engage in movement to expel the negative effects of our stress response to performance anxiety, we can instead reappraise our anxiety as excitement. Anxiety is often characterized by a perception of low control, high arousal, distress, and negative emotion. Author of the research study, Alison Wood Brooks, conceptualizad anxiety as “a state of distress and/or physiological arousal in reaction to stimuli including novel situations and the potential for undesirable outcomes.” Anxiety and excitement, however, share similar physiological effects in the body. For example, anxiety and excitement share high arousal states and increased heart rate. Therefore, appraising anxiety as a positive emotion that initiates a similar physiological response, such as excitement, instead of an emotion with a different physiological response, such as calm, was found to improve performance, confidence, competency, persuasiveness, persistence, and feelings of excitement by creating an opportunity mindset over a fear mindset.
So, next time you have a job interview, meeting, or public speaking event where you start to feel anxious, try telling yourself out loud “I am excited,” and try to really believe it. See what happens.