How 'Anxious Reappraisal' Can Help Turn Anxiety Into Productivity - The Atlantic

How 'Anxious Reappraisal' Can Help Turn Anxiety Into Productivity - The Atlantic

It’s called “anxiety reappraisal,” and it boils down to telling yourself that you feel excited whenever you feel nervous. It sounds stupidly simple, but it's proven effective in a variety of studies and settings.

It’s also counterintuitive: When most people feel anxious, they likely tell themselves to just relax. “When asked, ‘how do you feel about your upcoming speech?’, most people will say, ‘I’m so nervous, I’m trying to calm down,’” said Alison Wood Brooks, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied the phenomenon. She cites the ubiquitous “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters as partial evidence.

But that might be precisely the wrong advice, she said. Instead, the slogan should be more like, “Get Amped and Don’t Screw Up.”

That’s because anxiety and excitement are both aroused emotions. In both, the heart beats faster, cortisol surges, and the body prepares for action. In other words, they’re “arousal congruent.” The only difference is that excitement is a positive emotion‚ focused on all the ways something could go well.

Calmness is also positive, meanwhile, but it’s also low on arousal. For most people, it takes less effort for the brain to jump from charged-up, negative feelings to charged-up, positive ones, Brooks said, than it would to get from charged-up and negative to positive and chill. In other words, its easier to convince yourself to be excited than calm when you’re anxious.

Brooks discovered this for herself by performing a series of three experimentsfor a study published in 2014. After rounding up her participants, she surprised them with a series of tasks that most people find at least a little bit anxiety-inducing.

First, they were asked to sing the song “Don’t Stop Believin” by the band Journey in front of the group. (“I chose ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ as the target song because it can be performed easily in three different octaves,” Brooks wrote. It “was also the 21st most downloaded song in iTunes history and tends to be extremely familiar to English speakers.”)

The participants were then told to either say “I am anxious,” “I am excited,” or nothing before they broke into song. The “excited” participants not only felt more excited, and they also sang better, according to a computerized measurement of volume and pitch. Their on-and-on-and-ons were just more, well, on—perhaps because the participants themselves were.

The same was true of a speech test. When asked to give a two-minute speech on camera, the excited participants spoke longer and were seen as more persuasive, confident, and persistent. Then came a math test, in which the excited participants similarly outperformed a group that was told to remain calm.

Surprisingly, though, the excitement reappraisal didn't actually make the subjects less anxious, nor did it lower their heart rate. That’s because the underlying anxiety was the same—it was just reframed as excitement.