Everyone feels nerves and anxiety from time to time, even those with high levels of confidence. But when it comes time to performing under pressure, how can stress impact performance?
Harvard Business School professor Alison Wood Brooks, PhD, asked hundreds of people what they thought they should do if they felt extreme nervousness before a high-pressure event, such as delivering a speech to one's entire organization. According to the Wall Street Journal, 91 percent of respondents thought the best thing to do was try to calm down, as opposed to feeling excited.
To determine if attempting to stay calm is really the best way to improve performance in high-pressure situations, Dr. Brooks enlisted 140 people to give a speech. She told half of the participants to try to relax by repeating the phrase "I am calm," and the other half to embrace their nerves and repeat "I am excited." While participants from both groups still felt nervous before delivering their speeches, audience members who rated the talks indicated those in the excited group sounded more persuasive, confident and competent than members of the group that tried to calm down, according to the report.
Jeremy Jamieson, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester (Minn.), specializes in stress. He agrees it is a fallacy to assume attempting to control anxiety instead of harnessing the energy anxiety and stress creates leads to better performance. To test his theory, he performed an experiment among 60 students who were preparing to take the Graduate Record Examination, a standardized test used for admission to PhD programs.
Before administering a practice GRE, he gave half of the students a brief "mindset intervention" pep talk to approach their nervousness about the test in a more constructive way. "People think that feeling anxious while taking a standardized test will make them do poorly," he told the students, according to the report. "However, recent research suggests that stress doesn't hurt performance on these tests and can even help performance. People who feel anxious during a test might actually do better…. If you find yourself feeling anxious, simply remind yourself that your stress could be helping you do well." In the end, these students scored higher on the test.
To ensure his pep talk wouldn't inadvertently calm the students down, Dr. Jamieson measured the levels alpha-amylase, a hormonal indicator of stress, before and after the exam. The students in the group who heard Dr. Jameison's pep talk actually had higher levels of the hormone in their saliva after the test, meaning they were more stressed than before the exam started, according to the report.
However, Dr. Jameison found that stress alone does not lead to improved performance. Students with high stress who heard his pep talk scored higher on the exam, while there was no relationship between the high stress levels and test scores in the control group. The key is actively and deliberately transforming the feeling of nervousness to an energetic and excited mindset.