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: trying to calm down performed worse than reframing anxiety as excitement.
Brooks ran a pilot study and four experiments across three performance domains: karaoke singing, public speaking, and math tests. The exact intervention varied by study. In the public speaking experiment, 140 participants delivered a 2 to 3-minute persuasive speech after being randomly assigned to say either "I am excited" or "I am calm" right before performing.
The results from the public speaking study were striking. Speakers who said "I am excited" before their presentations were rated significantly more persuasive, competent, confident, and persistent 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 are physiologically similar high-arousal states. Racing heart, sweaty palms, heightened arousal, increased alertness. Your body is already in a high-arousal state either way. Both states involve 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 speaking and singing experiments, participants said the phrase out loud right before performing. In later math studies, even reading "Try to get excited" on a screen helped. 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 standard advice has been to "calm down" before high-stakes performances. The research shows a simpler reframe works better: 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 don't have to fight the energy. You can redirect it.
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.