You're backstage, minutes from your presentation. Your heart pounds. Your palms sweat. A well-meaning colleague notices and offers the same advice people have given for generations: "Just calm down. Take a deep breath. Relax."
You try. You really try. But fighting the adrenaline surge only makes you feel more out of control. The harder you push against the anxiety, the stronger it pushes back. What if the problem isn't that you failed to calm down, but that calming down was never the right goal?
The Research
In 2014, Harvard Business School researcher Alison Wood Brooks published a study that upended conventional wisdom about pre-performance anxiety. Her work, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, reveals something counterintuitive: the universal advice to "calm down" actually makes performance worse.
Brooks ran four experiments with approximately 300 participants across three different performance domains: karaoke singing, public speaking, and math tests. In each case, participants were randomly assigned to say either "I am excited" or "I am calm" before performing.
The results were striking. Speakers who said "I am excited" before their presentations were rated significantly more persuasive, competent, and confident by blind observers. They also felt more confident themselves and adopted what psychologists call an "opportunity mindset" rather than a "threat mindset."
Why This Happens
The secret lies in understanding what anxiety and excitement have in common: they share nearly identical physiological signatures. Racing heart, sweaty palms, heightened arousal, increased alertness. Your body can't tell the difference between "I'm terrified" and "I can't wait." Both states involve high activation of your sympathetic nervous system.
When you try to calm down, you're essentially asking your body to shift from high arousal to low arousal. This is swimming against a powerful current. Your system is flooded with adrenaline, preparing you for action, and you're telling it to stand down. The mismatch creates internal conflict.
But reframing anxiety as excitement keeps you in that same high-arousal state. You're simply changing the label, not fighting the sensation. Your body stays activated and ready, but now that energy feels like fuel rather than fear. Brooks calls this "arousal congruency." The reframe works because it matches what your body is already doing.
Practical Applications
1. Say It Out Loud
In the experiments, participants who physically said "I am excited" performed better than those who just thought it. The verbal declaration seems to cement the reframe. Before your next presentation, step aside and actually say the words. This isn't just positive thinking. It's a deliberate cognitive intervention.
2. Embrace the Physical Sensations
Stop interpreting your racing heart as evidence that something is wrong. Those sensations are your body mobilizing resources for performance. Athletes feel the same thing before competition. Reinterpret the butterflies as your system preparing to excel rather than evidence of impending failure.
3. Adopt an Opportunity Mindset
Anxiety makes you focus on potential threats and what could go wrong. Excitement shifts your attention to possibilities and potential gains. Before speaking, ask yourself what you could gain from this moment rather than what you might lose. This mental shift aligns your thinking with your newly labeled arousal state.
4. Practice the Reframe in Low-Stakes Situations
The more you practice relabeling anxiety as excitement, the more automatic it becomes. Start with smaller speaking situations, meetings, casual presentations, or practice sessions, before applying it to high-stakes moments.
The Bottom Line
For decades, the advice has been wrong. Telling yourself (or others) to "calm down" before high-stakes performances fights your biology and makes things worse. The more effective strategy is simpler and counterintuitive: acknowledge the arousal, relabel it as excitement, and channel that energy into your performance. Three words can change everything: "I am excited."
Put This Into Practice
The next time you feel pre-presentation nerves, remember you're not broken and you don't need to calm down. You need to redirect that energy.
Impromptu practice and interview practice in speaking.app give you a private environment to train your brain to associate that pre-speech arousal with opportunity rather than threat. Record yourself, review your performance, and watch the reframe become second nature.