One Body, Two Thoughts

The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage, ca. 1874 — The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage, Edgar Degas, ca. 1874. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0).

Before a presentation, the heart races and the hands are cold. The thought has a label ready: this feeling means something is wrong. KTT counts it as a thought, noticed or not, even when it arrives as a plain name for a racing heart. A claim has spread widely: saying “I am excited” instead of “I am calm” improves the result. The studies behind it say something narrower. They did not test whether a thought comes first.

The advice

A second thought answers the first: calm down. Alison Wood Brooks reports that an overwhelming majority of people believe that trying to calm down is the best way to cope with anxiety before a performance. A third thought offers another name: this is excitement. Anxiety and excitement are both high-arousal states, so changing the label may be easier than changing the arousal.

The first studies

In Brooks’s 2014 experiments, people who told themselves they were excited did better than people who tried to calm down in karaoke singing, public speaking and math. Saying “I am excited” out loud made people feel more excited, and in the public speaking study judges rated their speeches as better. People who reappraised their anxiety as excitement were also more likely to take an opportunity outlook, seeing the task as a chance and not a danger.

The replication

In 2025, a direct replication of the public speaking study found nearly identical results for how people felt. It found no difference between conditions on any rating by observers, and none on an extra indirect measure of anxiety. The new name changed the feeling people reported, not clearly the speech. It also did not make people report feeling less anxious. The singing and math results were not part of that replication.

What is left

Whether a new name improves the performance itself is open. Whether the thought comes before the feeling or after it is also open: the studies tested what people were told to say, not which thought arrived first. Whether it works for stronger or longer-lasting anxiety is unknown, since these studies covered brief performance tasks. Strong or lasting anxiety can call for professional care, and this article describes thoughts, not treatment.