Anxiety and excitement are usually seen as completely different. After all, one is positive, and one is negative. But how different are they really?
When we’re anxious, we may feel tensions, restless and nervous. We may also start sweating, breathing rapidly, have trouble concentrating and have an increased heart rate. And this is similar to how we react when excited. Both leave us feeling aroused.
So What’s the Difference?
According to Jim JP Collins, host of The Anxiety Podcast, “The difference is in our interpretation.” In other words, if we recognise these feelings as positive, we’ll feel excited. If we see them as negative, we’ll feel anxious. And this has been proven by research too.
Excitement Helps Us Perform Better
To test all this out, Harvard Business School’s Alison Wood Brooks told participants to say either “I am anxious”, “I am excited” or nothing before performing a task. She then asked them to sing “Don’t Stop Believin” in front of their group in an impromptu karaoke session.
Not only were the “excited” participants more excited, they also sang better according to a computerised measurement of volume and pitch. And similar results were found when they were asked to deliver a 2-minute speech on camera and complete a math test.
And the most interesting thing? All the participants were equally as anxious- even the excited ones. Simply saying they were excited didn’t even change their heart rate. In fact, the only difference was that they thought of their experience as “exciting” rather than stressful.
Thinking Positively Helps
And this is not the only study to have shown the power of interpretation. Back in 2010, researchers found that when they told people that feeling anxious would help them do better on a maths test, they performed better. The people here didn’t even have to “feel” excited. They were simply told to think of their anxiety as a helpful factor, rather than a hindrance.
To conclude, anxiety and excitement produce many of the same neurological responses. And so, switching between the two can just be a matter of thinking positively or negatively.
