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Everyone sang Don't Stop Believing
They didn't get to pick the song. As soon as they learned what was coming, their hearts started beating faster.
Before singing, a researcher had some of them say out loud, "I am excited," and had others say, "I am anxious." Everyone had the same racing heart, and only the word differed.
The ones who said they were excited felt more excited. They also sang the song better: they were less off-key and more accurate, measured by software that analyzed their voices.
Why do excitement and anxiety feel alike?
Both are high-arousal states: the heart speeds up, breathing quickens, and the body gets ready to act. Only the interpretation differs, which is why the same racing heart can be read as dread or as eagerness. Alison Wood Brooks of Harvard Business School ran studies on this in 2014 and found that saying a person is excited before a performance improved results in tasks like singing, public speaking, and math. The two states share nearly the same physical signature.
Why is excited easier to reach than calm?
Moving from high arousal to low arousal is hard when the body is already revved up. Shifting a high-arousal state from negative to positive takes less effort because the body does not have to change. Brooks and colleagues tested a calming instruction against an excitement instruction in the same 2014 paper. The group told to get excited generally did better than the group told to calm down.
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