I have experienced anxiety all my life. Below is a scientifically proven technique to help manage it. Anxiety when acting on a real threat is fantastic! It starts the fight or flight response so we can run and fight for survival. When we have anxiety due to false alarms making us have unrealistic fear… then it sucks. So how do we control when the proverbial fire alarm in our body has been pulled without the actual fire? Our heart beats faster, we start sweating, stress hormones start kicking in and our body makes us feel we are in a scary or threatening situation when we are not. So what do we do?.. We give it a job.

In a study from the Harvard Business School written by Alison Wood Brooks called Get Excited: Reappraising Pre-Performance Anxiety as excitement she shared that the physiological symptoms of anxiety and excitement are very similar, same racing heart, same perspiration, and same stress hormones kicking in. So how do we manage the anxiety to overcome performance anxiety? you change the focus from fear of “what if…”insert negative situation”…this happens” to the feeling of excitement. Start off by saying out loud “I am excited”. Then we insert the re-frame, We give the feeling “anxiety and give it a job or a different perspective of why we have this feeling. Instead of feeling out of control and not knowing what the fear is we give it a job. We label it as excitement and then we name the excitement. Example people who have fear of talking in front of people could re-frame how they view the situation before giving a presentation. For example stating first “I am excite”. Ex. “I am excited to go on stage in front of all these people because I want my children to be proud of me”. “What if I go out there and make a fool of myself?”.  Can you feel the difference between and excitement re-frame to a fear full statement?

This technique works with performance anxiety. What is performance anxiety? It is when you are doing an activity in front of people such as giving a speech, playing music in front of people, acting, playing a sport, spelling bee, etc. Before the event have a clear idea of how you will re frame the situation in your head so you can transform debilitating anxiety to exhilarating excitement.

This will take the energy of anxiety that may feel like a runaway train and allows you to change the track so instead of crashing and burning you alter the course of crash and burn to excitement and celebration.

The knee jerk reaction to anxiety is to calm down and yes there is a time and place for this and there are other techniques. With performance anxiety it is easier to change the track and use the anxiety energy for excitement energy for your advantage. Give it a try. Leave a comment and tell me if this was helpful.

If you want more information about this please check out the above study and read one of Mel Robbins books including the 5 second rule.

My best,

Stuart