How to Turn Your Anxiety Into Excitement

I’m trying to bask in the chaos.

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” — Soren Kierkegaard

It was a Monday of my senior year in college. I was sitting in COMM 101 — Public Speech.

Apart from the whole public speaking thing, COMM 101 is a hilariously easy class. There were about 20 students. It’s a gen-ed composed of mostly freshmen. I was taking it for one of my last credits before I could finally apply for graduation.

That Monday was the day of our first in-class speech, and I was sitting in the back corner of the room obsessively going over my notes. I was terrified.

Public speaking is a huge fear of mine.

As I studied, I pressed my hand on the paper that was my script and… shit. I left a sweat imprint that went through paper straight to the table.

I was anxious, uncomfortable, and dreaded that speech.

“Oh God, what’s going to happen when you freeze up and forget what to say?”

This and other unhelpful thoughts raced through my brain. I couldn’t control what my brain was thinking and how it was making me feel.

Let’s leave it at this: the speech did not go well.

I stumbled through my words, I forgot an entire paragraph, and I could barely maintain eye contact with my script, much less the audience.

Though no one else in the class gave a damn about how my speech went, I was embarrassed, humiliated, and irrationally annoyed with myself.

Flashback to 2 months earlier: December 2019

It’s the 2019 IBJJF No-Gi World Championships, and I’m minutes away from competing in the finals of the purple belt middleweight division.

I’m about to fight for a world title, but I looked like I was about to do anything but that.

I sat behind the mat with one headphone covering my ear and the other tucked behind my head. I wasn’t sweating; if anything, I was a little bit cold.

I was listening to “Bad Guy” by Billie Eilish in one ear, and listening to my friend Jack tell me jokes about something completely unrelated to jiu-jitsu. I was barely thinking about the match. I was just existing.

Obviously, I was anxious, but I was in control of that anxiety.

“It’s the World finals… the world is about to see how TRASH your jiu-jitsu is.” screamed my brain, in one last attempt to break me down.

“These thoughts are not real,” I said to myself and took a deep breath.

Then, the referee called me and my opponent to the mat. I smiled, took another deep breath, and went out and won a world title.

That was cool.

Turning Anxiety “OFF” and Excitement “ON”

The difference between these two circumstances baffled me for quite a while.

How could I possibly be so calm before such a large event like the world finals of something I’d put hours on hours into, but speaking to 19 people in my class at school (doing a speech that wasn’t even graded) gave me so much anxiety that I had to change shirts afterward?

The answer is the key to turning your anxiety into excitement.

According to neuroscientist Sam Harris, the feeling of anxiety is basically identical to the feeling of excitement. The difference is that anxiety has a negative feeling associated with it and excitement a positive one.

If the feelings are identical, there has to be a way that we can flip that negative feeling into a positive.

According to Sam, the Buddhists, and many other anxiety experts (like my therapist), the key to reducing anxiety is mindfulness and meditation.

I know…

Meditation. Such original advice. Whoopty-fuckin’-doo.

This isn’t exactly news, but it’s pretty darn important.

If you want to get over your anxiety, you have to accept that you have anxiety. You do that by sitting on a fucking couch or chair or cushion and thinking about nothing.

Then, you do it every day, for a long time.

Trust me, you don’t want my meditation advice — I’m still a beginner myself — but you can learn more about it here. I usually just type in “meditation music” or “guided meditation” on my phone, and try to do about 10 minutes per day.

My anxiety is creative, deceitful, and sometimes the things that worry me are borderline ridiculous; for example, one time I couldn’t fall asleep at night until I figured out what I was going to do if tomorrow I became paralyzed from the neck down.

As ridiculous as the worry sounds, the fear you feel in the moment seems very real.

That’s why you have to try to change your interpretation of what you feel.

Tell yourself a better story.

Once you’ve calmed yourself down through meditation, exercise, or whatever other methods you choose to use, you can reimagine the situation that’s causing you anxiety.

According to Sam Harris, the difference between anxiety and excitement is “the story you’re telling yourself.”

Some of the toughest jiu-jitsu athletes and MMA fighters that I know are not at all anxious to compete, but they are terrified of flying. This is likely because the story that they tell themselves about flying is rather terrifying.

You can also take my jiu-jitsu match as an example:

Though I was anxious, I also believed in my heart that I could achieve my goal that day. I believed that because for months (and years) before that day, I told myself I could be a world champion.

I also told myself that it didn’t matter if I won or lost and that I’d be safe no matter what happened. I was free to fail, and that made me free to succeed.

Not everyone experiences motivation like that (lookin’ at you, “failure is not an option”-people), but I cannot be motivated by rigidity. The more I allow anxiety to build, the more it decreases my brain function to the point where I’m sweaty, dissociating, and on the verge of panic.

Failure at Worlds was an option for me, but because I wanted to be there so badly I wasn’t under any pressure. I was simply playing a game.

Use Game Theory to Defeat Anxiety.

“When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.” — Jane McGonigal

If you just can’t change the story about what’s making you anxious, try applying game theory.

Everything in life is a game. Some games just have higher stakes than others. Make defeating anxiety and persisting into a game.

One thing I love about competing is that I know that it’s a relatively safe space for me to test my ability to handle my nerves. That’s the main reason I am diligent and consistent in my competition schedule.

The risk of serious injury is pretty low, but winning is also incredibly important to me. Controlling my breathing, managing my doubts, and still trying to be as effective as possible is a game to me.

“The reason to play the game is to be free of it.” — Naval Ravikant

Wouldn’t it be nice to be free of the anxiety game?

“But Chris, you don’t understand how important my _____ is…”

I know, I know. I don’t know your life.

However, I do know anxiety pretty well. I know that it won’t go away if you constantly feed it, avoid it, and neglect it.

You have to run at it head-on, and when it knocks you back on your ass you have to get up and run at it again.

Everyone has something to be anxious about, but not everyone overcomes their anxiety. Not everyone wants to do the work.

To manage your anxiety naturally, you have to work really hard. No matter what it is that is making you anxious.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a doctor and do not pretend to be one on the internet.