How to End Anxiety

When you reframe anxiety as excitement and gratitude, you feel better and your performance improves, too. It's a better tactic than telling yourself to calm down.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to the Gratitude Diaries, a production of My Heart Radio. Hi,
I'm Janice Caplin. Thanks for joining me for more practical
ideas on how to be happier. Today's tip, if you're
feeling anxious about something, try to flip that anxiety into excitement.

(00:24):
It's easier to do than you may realize. Most of
us go through a whole range of emotions in a
typical day. You're happy, you're sad, you're somewhere in between.
But emotions aren't quite as straightforward as you may think.
For example, imagine that you're about to give a toast
at a friend's wedding. Right now. That maybe a zoom toast,

(00:47):
but even so, you want it to be great. Talking
in front of a big crowd may make you anxious,
and all the symptoms are there. Your heart is pounding,
and you're worried about making a mistake or saying something silly.
But how about if you take that anxious feeling and
turn it around. Instead of worrying about whether you'll be

(01:08):
good enough, think about how grateful you are to get
to talk about your friend. Consider that ripped up feeling
to be excitement rather than anxiety, and you'll probably give
a much better toast. Reframing your emotions gives you a
wonderful sense of control, and research shows that it may

(01:28):
be one of the best ways to improve your performance
and do your best. Alison would Brooks, Now, an associate
professor at Harvard Business School, did a fascinating series of
experiments a few years ago where she found that how
we talk about our feelings as a strong influence on
how we actually feel. Often, when we're anxious, we tell

(01:52):
ourselves to calm down. You know, we've all adopted the
old British slogan of keep calm and harry on, but
that directive may not be the best advice. If your
heart is pounding, your mind is whirling, and maybe those
palms are getting a little sweaty, telling yourself to calm
down is unlikely to get you anywhere. Instead, try to

(02:17):
think of those physical symptoms from a different perspective. You
get that very same pounding heart when you're excited, so
tell yourself that the rived up feeling is gratitude and excitement.
When you're anxious, you think about all the things that
could go wrong. Reframe it as positivity and excitement, and
you're more likely to think about the things that could

(02:38):
go right or be fun. It's also impressive to see
how reframing the way you think about your feelings changes
your actual performance. In one experiment, Allison Woodbrooks told participants
they were going to get some difficult math problems. Some
of the men and women were told to try to
remain calm, others were told to try to get revved

(03:01):
up and excited. A control group was given no directions.
The people who were urged to be excited did considerably
better on the test than any of the others, and
afterwards they felt much more confident about the test. Brooks
did another similar experiment involving karaoke. Here, participants were told

(03:21):
that they would be singing a popular rock song on
a video game console. Various people were told to express
different emotions before they started, then the game rated them
on pitch, rhythm, and volume of their singing. Now, I
personally can't sing at all, so I probably would have
done terribly no matter which emotional group I had been assigned,

(03:43):
But the general results were pretty clear. Participants who said
they were excited and told themselves they were excited before
they started to sing scored an average of those who
told themselves they were anxious scored only. What's amazing here
is that those emotional statements were randomly assigned. Simply saying

(04:06):
out loud how you feel in a positive or negative way,
even if it's just what someone else has told you
to say, makes you do differently. Alison wood Brooks says
the talking about excitement increases confidence, improves performance, and boosts
how you think you'll do in the future. Just expressing
that positive emotion could begin an upward spiral of performance.

(04:31):
You say you're excited, so you do well, and when
you do well, you get more excited and continue to
do even better. Wood Brooks also says that doing this
regularly will not bring diminishing returns. Rather, the more often
you reevaluate your pre performance anxiety as excitement, the more
likely you are to continue triggering upward spirals of happiness.

(04:55):
By the way, pre performance anxiety is okay as a start,
because times it can make you more motivated. You make
sure you're better prepared and have done everything you possibly can.
But once all that's taken care of, the anxiety doesn't
do any good, and that's the point at which you
want to turn it around and think of those feelings
as being grateful excitement. So today, if you're doing something

(05:20):
that might make you nervous, going for a job interview,
seeing the doctor, or trying to help your kids with
algebra homework, prepare for it the best you can do
the work, get motivated, be prepared, and when the event comes,
if your heart is beating hard, let your brain jump
from charged up negative feelings to charge it up positive ones.

(05:40):
You don't have to calm down, you can stay amped up.
As long as the energy is focused in a positive,
excited and grateful direction, you'll probably do better and better.
Thanks for joining me. I'll be back tomorrow with more
ideas on how to add gratitude to your life and
make every day a little brighter at a great day.

(06:04):
The Gratitude Diaries is a production of I heart Radio.
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