Telling yourself “I am excited” before a stressful event works better than trying to calm down, and the reason is surprisingly simple: anxiety and excitement are nearly identical in your body. Both spike your heart rate, quicken your breathing, and flood you with adrenaline. The only real difference is how your brain interprets those sensations. Shifting that interpretation, a technique psychologists call arousal reappraisal, takes seconds and measurably improves performance.
Why Anxiety and Excitement Feel the Same
Your nervous system doesn’t distinguish between “I’m terrified of this presentation” and “I can’t wait to get on stage.” Both states crank up sympathetic nervous system activity, the branch responsible for your fight-or-flight response. Your heart beats faster, your palms sweat, your muscles tense. Research on self-reported excitement confirms this overlap: people who rated themselves as excited during an activity showed higher heart rates and stronger sympathetic activation, the same markers you’d see during anxiety.
This shared biology is the entire reason the reappraisal trick works. When you try to calm down before a high-pressure moment, you’re asking your body to slam the brakes on a system that’s already revving. You need to shift from high arousal to low arousal (a physiological change) and from negative to positive (a cognitive change). That’s two shifts at once, and your body often can’t do it on command. Reframing anxiety as excitement only requires one shift: changing the meaning from negative to positive. The arousal stays exactly where it is.
What the Research Actually Shows
Alison Wood Brooks, a researcher at Harvard Business School, ran a series of experiments testing this idea across public speaking, math tests, and karaoke singing. The results were consistent. People who said “I am excited” out loud before a speech were rated by independent judges as more persuasive, more competent, more confident, and more persistent than people who said “I am calm.” These weren’t small differences. The gap in perceived persuasiveness and confidence between the two groups was substantial.
On a timed math test, the pattern held. People in the excitement group scored significantly higher than those who tried to stay calm or said nothing at all. The calm group and the neutral group performed identically, meaning the effort to calm down provided zero measurable benefit over doing nothing. Reframing as excitement was the only strategy that actually moved the needle.
The mechanism behind these gains comes down to mindset. People who reappraised their anxiety as excitement shifted into what researchers call an opportunity mindset: they saw the situation as a chance to do well rather than a threat to survive. Those who tried to calm down stayed locked in a threat mindset, the same defensive posture that anxiety creates in the first place. The opportunity mindset didn’t just change how people felt. It changed how they performed.
What Happens in Your Brain
When you relabel an emotion, you activate cognitive control regions in the front of your brain, areas responsible for planning, decision-making, and regulating impulses. A meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies found that cognitive reappraisal consistently engages these prefrontal regions while simultaneously dialing down activity in the amygdala, the brain’s threat-detection center. No other brain regions showed this pattern of reduced activity during reappraisal, only the amygdala.
In practical terms, this means the simple act of reframing what you’re feeling gives your rational brain more influence over the emotional alarm system. You’re not suppressing the emotion or pretending it doesn’t exist. You’re giving your brain a different story about what those physical sensations mean, and the threat center quiets down in response.
How to Do It in Practice
The technique is deliberately minimal. In the studies, participants used nothing more than a short phrase spoken out loud. Here’s how to apply it:
- Say it out loud. When you notice pre-performance jitters, say “I am excited” or “I’m so excited about this” before you begin. Speaking the words out loud matters. It creates a stronger cognitive shift than thinking them silently.
- Use external cues. In one experiment, participants simply read the words “get excited” on a screen before performing, and it worked. You can write the phrase on a sticky note, set it as a phone reminder before a meeting, or put it on an index card you read before walking into a job interview.
- Don’t fight the physical sensations. The racing heart, the tight stomach, the restless energy: these are fuel. Instead of interpreting them as proof that something is wrong, treat them as your body preparing to perform. That interpretation is physiologically accurate.
- Reframe the situation, not just the feeling. Pair the emotional relabeling with a quick mental shift about the event itself. Instead of “this could go badly,” think “this is a chance to show what I can do.” The opportunity mindset is what drives the performance gains.
When This Works Best
Arousal reappraisal is most effective for acute, situational anxiety: the kind that spikes before a specific event and has a clear endpoint. Public speaking, job interviews, first dates, athletic competitions, exams, and performances are all ideal contexts. These are situations where your body is ramping up in anticipation, and you need that energy to perform well rather than freeze up.
The technique is less suited to chronic, generalized anxiety that persists without a clear trigger. If your anxiety isn’t tied to a performance moment but instead follows you through ordinary days, the arousal reappraisal framework doesn’t map as cleanly. Chronic anxiety often involves sustained activation that doesn’t resolve after a single event, and the “get excited” approach is designed for moments, not ongoing states.
It also works better when the stakes feel real but manageable. If you’re mildly nervous about a team meeting, reappraisal can easily tip that energy into enthusiasm. If you’re in the grip of a panic attack, the intensity of the physical symptoms may make it harder to engage the cognitive relabeling process. The sweet spot is the moderate anxiety most people feel before something that matters to them.
Why “Calm Down” Backfires
Telling yourself to calm down before a high-pressure moment is one of the most common pieces of advice people give and receive. The research suggests it’s largely ineffective. In the math performance experiments, people who reappraised their anxiety as calmness performed no better than people who received no instructions at all. The calm group and the control group scored identically.
The problem is the mismatch between what your body is doing and what you’re telling it to do. Your system is flooded with stress hormones, your heart rate is elevated, and your muscles are primed for action. Asking all of that to suddenly quiet down is like trying to stop a car by shifting directly from fifth gear to reverse. Your body resists it, and the gap between what you’re feeling and what you’re telling yourself to feel can actually increase distress. You end up anxious about being anxious.
Excitement, by contrast, matches your body’s current state. You’re simply putting a different label on sensations that are already happening. Your brain accepts the new label more readily because nothing about your physical experience needs to change. This concept, called arousal congruency, is the core reason reappraisal outperforms relaxation strategies in pre-performance situations.