How To Turn Nervousness Into High Performance¹

"Just relax."

You've heard it before a race, a heavy PR attempt, or even before a big work assignment. It sounds like reasonable advice. And yet, it appears that the advice doesn’t work as well as you’d think, and researchers figured out why.

When you feel nervous before a performance, trying to calm down may actually make things worse. Reframing that anxiety as excitement has been shown to improve performance across multiple domains.

In a series of controlled experiments², psychologists tested what happens when people reappraise pre-performance anxiety rather than suppress it. Across a karaoke singing task, a public speaking challenge, and a timed math test, participants who were instructed to say "I am excited" before performing consistently outperformed those told to "remain calm."

Anxiety and excitement are physiologically almost identical: elevated heart rate, heightened alertness, increased respiration. What separates them is how your brain interprets that arousal. Anxiety frames the situation as a threat. Excitement frames it as an opportunity.

Trying to calm down asks your nervous system to lower its arousal level entirely, which is genuinely hard to do on command. The reappraisal flip — same energy, different label — is a much shorter distance to travel.

In the research, participants who reappraised anxiety as excitement adopted a measurable opportunity mindset rather than a threat mindset, and performance followed.

According to Brad Stulberg, best-selling author of the new book, The Way Of Excellence,

Normalize the nerves. Reframe them as caring and readiness. Get to the starting line (or microphone, boardroom, stage, etc.) Let your training take over. Give yourself grace for being a human and feeling human things.

Anxiety isn’t always the enemy. Sometimes, it simply means that what you are attempting is hard, and that you care. Nothing is wrong with that. If anything, it’s quite the opposite. Caring is fuel. Learning to ride the waves is one of the most powerful skills you can develop — and like any other skill, it only gets better with practice.

It’s a reminder that your feelings, such as anxiety and nervousness, aren't a problem to solve. It’s about understanding and interpreting. Next time those feelings show up — before the heavy set, the race, the thing that matters — say it out loud: I'm excited.

You can’t control every thought. You can’t control every emotion. You can’t control every outcome. Mental toughness is learning to focus on what you can control: Where you put your attention. How you interpret your emotions and how you respond. And then what you do next.