Before you continue reading, let's try something simple first.
Pick something right now that tightens your stomach. You have an exam on Monday. You have a speech to make. A discussion you have been practicing while showering for a week now.
Think now about the minute before it starts.
Can you already feel it coming? Your heart starts pumping, your hands start feeling warmer, your breathing goes up to your chest. After that, from your mind or a kind person, you receive the usual advice: simply relax. Breathe calmly and let it go.
Watch what happens most of the time. It does not. The heart goes on, and you have an additional problem added to your original one: you are nervous, and you are failing in not being nervous.
This post is about that very minute. This post will not help you to calm your heartbeat. Nobody has found a reliable way to do that on demand, and as we saw in The Voice That Says You'll Fail, ordering the mind around rarely goes the way we hope. This is smaller, and, I believe, more practical. Your body could already be doing things right. The issue is what name to give it.
On Halloween, people pay for this feeling
Every year at Halloween time, people everywhere wait in line and pay good money to be scared. They enter spooky homes where someone suddenly jumps out at them. They ride terrifyingly fast roller coasters from great heights which they would not ever consider riding on a normal day.
Notice the looks on their faces as they emerge. You will find many of them laughing.
Here is one question that will certainly make you think. What is the difference between a racing heart on a roller coaster and a racing heart before an exam?
Physically, not much. The heart races. Our breathing gets faster. The hands might sweat. Both represent a state of heightened arousal, as our bodies prepare for something significant happening soon.
This difference lies mostly in our narrative. In the roller coaster ride, we term it fun. In the case of the test or speech, we call it fear. The same engine, two different labels.
This is what gets weird. Once we feel the engine starting before a test or speech, our immediate response is that of trying to turn it off. This response is quite common, and it is understandable. It might also be the most difficult path to take.
Almost everyone tries to calm down
The psychologist Alison Wood Brooks of Harvard Business School started with a simple premise. What do people think is the optimal strategy when they have feelings of anxiety before doing things such as making a speech or talking to one's boss?
It was found that an overwhelming majority of people believe that calming oneself down is the best coping strategy.
After this, she came up with another approach. In a series of experiments, she had people do activities that cause most of us anxiety: performing karaoke with other people listening, delivering a speech, doing math in a high-pressure situation. Before doing these tasks, some participants were encouraged to calm down. Some other participants were told to utter one sentence aloud: "I am excited."
Those who called their nerves excitement felt more excited and performed better than those who tried to stay calm. Also, they adopted the mind-set which was defined by Brooks as the opportunity mind-set, not the threat mind-set.
Consider the smallness of the change. No breathing techniques or pills were used. People were not trained for a week before these experiments. All they did is utter three words.
How could this work? For one thing, according to Brooks, arousal congruency comes into play here. Calmness and anxiety are poles apart; one is a relaxed state, while the other is an excited state. To go from a frenetic state to a calm one requires a lot of effort. Excitement and anxiety are quite similar to each other in their high level of energy. The body retains its energy and redirects it.
One cannot always control the speed of the engine. You may determine where it is heading.
The test that came three months later
One can fairly wonder whether it works only in a laboratory setting, where nothing much is at stake. This is exactly what a group of researchers under the leadership of Jeremy Jamieson from Harvard tried to investigate.
Their subjects were university students who prepared for the GRE, which is an exam widely used as an entrance exam for graduate programs in the United States. First, they came to the lab to do a practice test. Some were informed before starting the test that nervousness or arousal would boost their performance. Others were not told anything like that.
These students scored higher in the mathematics section of the practice test than the control group of students. Saliva samples of these students revealed increased presence of a substance which is associated with the body's arousal system. The students were not relaxed. Rather, their bodies were more aroused. They were simply channeling the energy in another direction.
The last portion of this study that I find most convincing is where the subjects brought their actual GRE scores one to three months later. Once again, those students who had been told that arousal can be helpful scored higher on the math portion of the exam.
One message, heard once, in a laboratory, before the practice test. And the mark was still seen in the real one.
Ten minutes on paper
Another thing occurs in that minute, more quietly. And that is worry filling the mind. What if I forgot everything? What if they noticed that my hands were trembling? What if it went wrong, and everybody remembered?
These thoughts are not polite enough to stay in a little corner of the brain; they take space, and it is harder for the brain with its negative thoughts to concentrate on its work.
At the University of Chicago, Gerardo Ramirez and Sian Beilock tried a simple idea, first in the lab and then in classrooms. Immediately prior to taking a crucial test, students were instructed to jot down their thoughts and emotions related to the exam. According to the University of Chicago report on the experiment, students spent about ten minutes doing so.
The result, in the researchers' own words: "Simply writing about one's worries before a high-stakes exam can boost test scores."
The effect was strongest for the students who were usually the most anxious about exams. The habitual worriers who wrote in the class setting performed comparably to their more relaxed peers.
How could writing be beneficial in such a situation? How about seeing it this way: the worries were already there, occupying space. Putting them down on paper means moving them out of one's head onto the paper. The paper can hold them, hence freeing up one's mind.
An old observation in new clothes
Nothing of all this would surprise the Stoics either. Seneca, who wrote "On Anger" almost two thousand years ago, writes about the first bodily reactions which precede any mental judgment. A chill response to a piece of bad news. Blushing. Dizziness from looking down from a height. They are not to be understood as weakness in character, according to him. They are felt even by the most wise people, he thought. It is the body's natural first response, not a judgment yet.
Then comes the judgment. And that is what is within our reach.
This is, I believe, where the modern research and ancient philosophy overlap. Our accelerated heartbeat comes on its own. Any of the interpretations that we give to it doesn't. "Something is wrong" is one explanation. "Something important is going to happen" is another. The heart will beat the same regardless.
Try it on yourself
Here's an experiment to try. Return to the scene you imagined earlier, the one-minute before your test or your presentation. Relive that feeling.
This time, instead of telling yourself to calm down, try saying this, aloud if you can: "I am excited."
The thing about me is that I normally hear the sentence "Erdem, you are not ready" before anything big happens. The moment I say, "I am excited," the heartbeat does not decrease its pace; the meaning is transformed. Instead, it will change its interpretation from a warning to a prelude.
How did that change your experience?
The words can seem somewhat silly to start with for many people. This is okay. The purpose of the exercise is not to make you believe in anything; just to divert the existing energy into something more constructive.
What this can and cannot do
Here honesty requires some boundaries. This refers to experiments that use volunteer subjects, often students, who perform particular actions such as singing, talking, solving math problems, taking a test. They tracked events both before and during these instances but not throughout the span of a person's life. "I am excited" will not get you ready for an exam you haven't studied for. Writing down your fears will not write your speech.
And none of this will turn the nerves into your problem. The nervousness is usually a sign that you care about what you are about to do. It would be unusual not to feel any before something you value very much. The point of these studies is more subtle: the nervousness doesn't need to be overcome before you start.
Before the next big moment
This is just one method you can try when your heart beats fast before an important task.
First, pay attention to the heartbeat, but don't order it to stop. Just observe it like you observe weather.
Second, state "I am excited," aloud if possible, and quietly if necessary. Mine sounds like this: "Erdem, this is your body getting ready."
Third, if the moment is an exam or something that you can get prepared for, give yourself about ten minutes before the time to put on paper all your concerns regarding it. Do not censor. Do not solve. Let the paper hold it.
Fourth, take that first step one time. Read the first question. Speak the first sentence. Open the door.
It is possible that the nerves will be still there once you start. This does not mean the process was ineffective. You might simply be about to undertake an important activity.
According to Seneca, the first tremor is of the body, while the next step is ours. On Halloween night, there are many who pay money just to make their hearts beat rapidly. Next time yours races for free, perhaps give it a better name.