A lot of people tend to conflate the ideas of fear and anxiety. We often even use the words interchangeably. But it's important to make a distinction here. Fear is about an actual or present threat, whereas anxiety is about the threat of a threat.
What tends to happen in anxiety disorders is that the threat of a threat is disproportionate to the likelihood of there being an actual threat. We get anxious about things happening that are not very likely to happen. We overvalue the threat of a threat, even if it’s not likely that the actual threat will occur.
This disproportionate overvaluing of the threat of something bad happening happens for a lot of reasons.
A False Alarm is Better than a Miss
Evolutionarily speaking, a false alarm is better than a miss. Meaning, that every time you see something in your peripheral vision, there is a possibility that it could be an attacker coming to get you. On the other hand, it could be a kitty coming up to say hi. But from an evolutionary perspective, it’s better to jump at a shadow that doesn’t represent an actual threat, rather than missing jumping at a shadow that does present an actual threat. In the first case, you feel a little silly, “Oh dear me, what a to-do,” and in the second case, you maybe die.
The thing is, most of the time, there isn’t an attacker coming to get us. Of course, this totally depends on your context, socioeconomic status, identity, and things like that. For sure there are people in this world who are at a greater risk of experiencing daily violence than others. However, I would argue that for those experiencing anxiety disorders especially, the worry about the threat of something bad happening still outstrips the likelihood that it will happen.
Something else that makes this even more true is confirmation bias, a psychological phenomenon by which we are more likely to seek out evidence that confirms our hypotheses, or in the case of anxiety disorders, that confirms our anxieties about the world. So if you went to a party once and felt ostracized and had a really horrible time, you’re more likely to think that that will happen every other time you go to a social event. You’re less likely to remember the times that you’ve had social interactions that were actually pleasant. This also isn’t helped by the fact that emotional memory is a lot more salient to us, so if you felt super anxious at that party where you had a bad experience, you’re more likely to remember that feeling of anxiety than a time where a social event felt a bit more neutral.
Okay, so we’re somewhat hardwired for anxiety. Great. Just what the hell do we do about this?
There are many schools of thought and therapeutic approaches that people can take towards dealing with anxiety.
Common Approaches
Two of the most common approaches include cognitive approaches like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or CBT, which puts an emphasis on being aware of and changing your thinking in order to change your emotions and behaviour, and mindfulness practices (like we see in dialectical behavioural therapy, or DBT) which encourage us to sit with difficult emotions and view them non-judgmentally as passing internal formations, rather than being an actual indication of an actual state of the world.
I use these types of approaches in my clinical work a lot. Like, every day a lot. I’m not going to talk too much about those here, but if you’re interested in hearing more about those, then maybe leave a comment below or reach out.
I do want to talk about an approach that I try to use personally, and have had some success with in my clinical practice.
Before I talk about this, let’s talk about some neuroscience and psychology and stuff.
Excitement and Anxiety are Physiologically Similar
From a physiological, neurochemical, and hormonal perspective, excitement and anxiety look very similar. Both states involve activation of the limbic system in the brain. These brain structures are part of a chemical cascade that stimulates your adrenal glands to release a hormone called cortisol, which gets your body ready to act and respond to something in your environment, often called the fight-or-flight response. Both involve increased heart-rate, rapid breathing, sweating… They do look pretty similar. It’s known as arousal congruence, because both are states of physiological arousal.
So why do they feel so different?
At first pass, it’s pretty obvious that anxiety is about something bad, whereas excitement is about something good. But what about things that are both? Like rollercoasters, first dates, performing on stage…? Therein lies the potential for both good and bad - tummy flip, good; falling to your death, bad - but I’d like to propose something else.
A Matter of Control
In my understanding, really the only difference between anxiety and excitement is the sense of control that you have over your environment.
For example, in Mihaly’s Czizentmihayi’s work in Positive Psychology and Flow States, he points out that the relationship between the degree of a challenge (external factors) and our capacity (internal factors) can make the difference between whether we find a task calming, boring, anxiety-provoking, or exciting. So when the external challenge is high, and our internal skills are high, that’s challenging and fulfilling, even exciting. But when the external challenge is high and our internal skills are low (or they are perceived as being low), that’s anxiety-provoking. Conversely, when the external challenge is low and our internal skills are high, that’s boredom.
So when we feel that we are capable of handling the challenges that are in our environment, that’s exciting. But when we don’t feel capable, we get anxious. Unfortunately, in anxiety disorders we often undervalue our skills and perceive ourselves as not being as capable as we actually are. So even when we perceive the environment as outstripping our skills, and we perceive a lack of capability and control, that might not actually be the case.
Given that 1) Anxiety and excitement are actually very similar, 2) The difference appears to be your perception of capability and control, and 3) Sometimes our sense of capability and control is undervalued - what can we do about this?
Well, as mentioned, cognitive approaches like CBT and approaches like DBT that incorporate mindfulness can be effective.
But let’s talk about a less conventional approach.
Anxiety Reappraisal
Allison Wood-Brooks, a professor at Harvard University, published a pretty interesting paper in 2014 about this phenomenon. She and her team ran a bunch of experiments which involved karaoke singing, public speaking, and doing math problems - situations and tasks in which many people feel anxious. One group was encouraged to relax and calm down - a pretty typical response to trying to manage performance anxiety. A second group was actually encouraged to reappraise their anxiety as - you guessed it - excitement.
And guess what? Not only did people in the Anxiety Reappraisal group report feeling subjectively less anxious, they actually performed better on the test metrics! Isn’t that wild?! All they did was use positive self-talk, like you see in CBT - they told themselves “I’m excited”, or received messages from others saying things like “Get excited” - and they were able to feel less anxious, more excited, and actually do better on their tasks!
The theory behind it was that since excitement and anxiety are arousal-congruent, changing the content of their thoughts to something more positive would help them actually appraise the situation as more of a challenging opportunity rather than something anxiety-provoking.
The way I see it is, the reappraisal and self talk about being excited helped people turn it from a situation where they felt out of control and incapable to a situation that presented a challenge that was within their grasp. If you change the content of your thinking to fool yourself into interpreting your arousal response as excitement rather than anxiety, you must be in control because excitement means that you don't feel out of control.
So, this is super compelling to me and as someone who does a fair bit of public speaking (and karaoke, for that matter). I’m going to try this next time I’m in a performance situation.
Outside of your typical performance anxiety, there might even be implications for dealing with social anxiety, which tends to have a component of performance anxiety. Through Anxiety Reappraisal, we can try to turn “Oh god will I say something stupid in public?” into "I'm so excited to meet new people!" This might even be helpful for people who have phobias, such as agoraphobia. We can try to turn "It's so unsafe out here" into "I'm so excited to explore!"
The implications for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) are a bit muddier. I'm not sure how this would work with a more generalized sense of anxiety when there isn’t a clear event or object present to reframe. However, like any mental illness, GAD is exacerbated by triggers. So there may be an opportunity to reframe thinking about specific triggers using this technique.
So that's an unconventional approach to dealing with anxiety that I hope, at the very least, you found interesting. Remember, the difference between anxiety and excitement is a matter of control - perceived or actual. It's up to you what you do with this information.
Thanks for reading, please comment below if you have anything to add! Respectful discussion and debate always welcome.
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