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The good news about anxiety

(Elizabeth von Oehsen/The Washington Post; iStock)

The first time my improv teacher called me up to act out a scene, my throat clenched and my vision briefly went dim. The thought of performing in front of other people, especially in a way that was meant to be silly, sent my anxiety into the stratosphere.

I had signed up for improv to boost my levels of the personality trait of extroversion for a book I was writing about personality change. There was only one problem: My high levels of “neuroticism,” the trait associated with anxiety, immobilized me every time I started to improvise. I felt like everyone could hear my heart pounding; I obsessed over trying to calm down instead of moving the scene forward.

For a while, I coped with improv class by trying to will my anxiety away. I got mad at myself for being so nervous during something that was supposed to be fun, and I tried to wave off the butterflies filling my stomach. But it turns out that was the wrong approach. Some psychologists now think a certain amount of anxiety can be useful.

A concept called the Yerkes-Dodson curve shows that when people have very high levels of anxiety, they don’t tend to perform well. They might be so worried about a big work project that they avoid getting started, for example. But at very low levels of anxiety, performance also suffers: They might be so relaxed that they rush through the project to watch Netflix.

“There’s actually the sweet spot in the middle, where anxiety is really adaptive,” or helpful, says Shannon Sauer-Zavala, a clinical psychology professor at the University of Kentucky. At that middle-ground point, anxiety “tells you, ‘This is important, I should pay attention to it, I should prepare for it.’”

Psychologist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary writes in her book Future Tense that anxiety can help narrow attention and heighten focus and detail orientation. It spurs creativity and motivates us to problem-solve. In some studies, people who felt anxious came up with more and better solutions to problems than those who felt calm.

Dennis-Tiwary writes in her book that when her son was diagnosed with a heart condition as a baby, anxiety and worry fueled her efforts to get him help. “Worry pushed me to figure out how to maximize the chances of a successful surgery,” she writes. Her mind racing, she read academic articles about her son’s condition, made lists of questions for his doctors and scoured community forums for information. “In the end,” she writes, “it was the worry that helped us get through.”

Anxiety can be a form of caring, of our minds highlighting what matters. It tells us that accomplishing our goals will require effort, and it pushes us to think about what efforts, exactly, we should take. It motivates us to take action. In one study, people who were somewhat, but not overly, anxious were more likely to pursue follow-up care after a heart transplant — and to survive.

In other words, you shouldn’t want to live completely free of anxiety, because you need anxiety to get things done.

Helpful or unhelpful?

The line between helpful and unhelpful anxiety is whether it causes what scientists call “functional impairment,” meaning it prevents you from living your life: Doing your job, caring for your family or interacting with other people.

If you feel your worrying is spiraling out of control, Dennis-Tiwary said when I called her, you should make a list of all the things that can go wrong. But also think about all the things that can go right. “Anxiety evolved to help us navigate uncertainty in life,” Dennis-Tiwary told me. “It evolved to help us focus on potential danger in our future. But to also remember that positive outcomes are still possible.”

For me, this was a new way of thinking about anxiety, and by extension, about neuroticism. Which meant if I wanted to deflate my neuroticism the best way to do that would be to listen to my anxiety, rather than to treat it like a pointless affliction and struggle against it.

Anxiety can be almost like a gut instinct, providing information from our subconscious about something bad looming ahead. It can be irrational, but it can also be rational. The trick is to learn from it, then let it move on.

It’s not just the feeling of anxiety that can be helpful in life. Actually experiencing a moderate number of stressful situations might be beneficial, as well. Just as you shouldn’t shy away from sometimes feeling anxious, you shouldn’t shy away from situations that might provoke anxiety.

“Having a child, getting a new job, winning a sports game or performing in front of people — those are all stressful,” says Jeremy Jamieson, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who researches stress. “If we didn’t engage with stress, if we just tried to avoid it, we really wouldn’t do anything that was innovative.”

Research on both humans and monkeys has found that enduring a small number of adverse events, such as a loved one’s illness or a parent’s divorce, can result in better mental health than experiencing either lots of adversity — or no adversity at all. Even severe misfortunes, such as bereavement, have an eventual silver lining by contributing to resilience. (Though this number is very approximate, Mark Seery, a psychologist at the University of Buffalo, said his research suggests that five adverse events across a lifetime seems like the happy medium.)

Experience with hardship seems to fortify you for the challenges that inevitably come up in life. Seery compares this “toughening” phenomenon to physical exercise — if you never work out, you’ll never be sore, but you also won’t grow stronger.

How to cope

One way to cope with these stressors is to acknowledge that yes, the situation is stressful, but you can handle the stress, because your jitters are giving you fuel. Studies suggest that reframing anxiety as a benefit — i.e., anxiety will help me think of the right answer — can help people feel less incapacitated by their nerves. When we feel this kind of “good” stress, our heart rate increases and our blood vessels dilate to deliver oxygen to the brain. Our bodies produce anabolic hormones, the kind of hormones that help boost performance. (Meanwhile, “bad” stress occurs when you decide you can’t handle the stressor. In that case, your body floods with hormones like cortisol, which don’t aid performance.)

Jamieson believes it’s preferable to go into a challenging situation, like a work presentation or first date, feeling a little bit amped than feeling totally calm. You should think to yourself, he says, “My heart’s racing because oxygen is getting to my brain — awesome.”

So I tried that.

During the improv “showcase” — a public performance for a few dozen strangers — that took place at the end of the series of improv classes, I could feel my heart drumming and my palms growing icy. This is good, I told myself. This will make me seem more energetic during my performance.

We settled into a common type of scene in which someone is extremely unqualified for their job, for which I played a secretary who kept falling asleep at inopportune moments. My fellow improvisers would request to be put through to various big shots, or to have paperwork faxed, and I would dramatically break into a stage-snore.

I tried to reassure myself that my nerves were lending my performance a kind of manic zaniness. I heard laughs and judged them to be only 60 percent out of pity. Then, our instructor called “scene,” and it was over. Comedy gold? Not quite. But I survived, and I felt proud for having leaped over this hurdle despite my anxiety — and possibly because of it.

Olga Khazan is the author of “Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change,” which is being released this month.

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(Abbey Lossing for The Washington Post)

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