Anxiety
A Little Bit of Anxiety Can Do a Whole Lot of Good
What is the perfect mix of anxiety and adrenalin to maintain peak performance?
Posted March 17, 2021 Reviewed by Davia Sills
Anxious? Well, that may be a good thing—in moderation.
Experts say anxiety increases a person’s arousal to the point where motivation, performance, and the ability to complete difficult tasks or activities are significantly enhanced. Too much of it, though, leads to neurological, psychological, and even physical disorders; too little of it might encourage an “it-don’t-matter-that-much” attitude, causing distractedness, disorganization, underachievement, and lack of ardor to do a job well.
All of which begs the question: What is the perfect mix of anxiety and adrenalin to maintain peak performance? The answer: It depends—it depends on an individual’s personality, confidence, and ability to manage stress, as well as the complexity of the task to be done.
Two psychologists in the early 20th century—Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson—determined from rodent experiments that an empirical relationship exists between performance and stress. Known today, especially within the subspecialty of managerial psychology, as the Yerkes-Dodson law, their theory was based on a scientific observation that maximum achievement is reached when an increased level of anxiety, such as what might occur before a job interview, a competitive sports match, or a tight deadline, arouses one’s mental and physiological alertness, including heart and breathing rates. This arousal, they said, promotes heightened attention and concentration to the task at hand.
But only to a point.
Analysis Paralysis
The duo warned that too much anxiety impairs performance by interfering with cognition and memory and prompting indecisiveness, uncertainty, insecurity, and, in some instances, panic. It causes one to “sweat the small stuff”; to become over-diligent, paralyzed by analysis and re-analysis; and to incessantly obsess and mull over minor project details, avoid decisions to the point of inaction, and hesitate to move forward to the next step until the previous one meets an artificial level of perfection. As leadership expert John Maxwell has written, “The greatest mistake we make is living in constant fear that we will make one.”
Worriers and perfectionists often become mired in self-blame for project detours or become difficult work partners because they project their unrealistic expectations on colleagues.
At the opposite end of the “I-care” spectrum are tasks so ordinary and mundane, like filing, filling orders, or downloading hard copies, they leave an employee bereft of anxiety—and demotivated. The result is boredom, lack of energy and focus, and carelessness, say Yerkes and Dodson.
It’s All a Delicate Balance
Anxiety serves as a natural response to our environment. It provides the psychological and physical underpinnings that enable us to avoid problematic situations or prepare for and face true dangers and potentially hurtful issues and concerns. But despite anxiety’s benefits, it can quickly develop into too much of a good thing without the coping mechanisms to keep it to an acceptable level.
American author and playwright Arthur Somers Roche wrote that “anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.” The truth of these words is reflected in an article published in the journal PLOS One. In it, authors propose that ruminating on perceived woes creates a pernicious cycle, in which worry creates more anxiety, which, in turn, causes additional worry. Such cycling is a primary cause of stress and can lead to a variety of mental health disorders, including obsessive-compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and depression. Scientists writing in a 2019 issue of the Journal of Affective Disorders found that anxious people tend to resist relaxation because of a desire to remain hypervigilant for something potentially bad happening.
Indeed, we are an overstressed society. Statistics indicate that as many as 20 percent of Americans experience abnormal anxiety in any given year. It is a condition that is debilitating emotionally, mentally, and physically and can be objectively measured by how we sleep.
Anxiety, Sleep, and the Brain
Numerous studies have demonstrated a connection between generalized anxiety and dysfunctional sleep. In a 2019 study in Cognitive Processing, researchers indicated that patients who tend to be perfectionists often have heightened anxiety and suffer from bouts of insomnia. Insomnia is not simply a disruption in normal sleep patterns; it is a disruption that can promote even more anxiety. A case in point is a 2019 study in the journal Nature Human Behavior, in which authors state that a sleepless night results in a 30 percent jump in a person’s anxiety level.
Simply stated: Getting sufficient sleep improves mood, willpower, and the discipline to stop spinning on the same issues over and over and over. The study in Cognitive Processing contends that deep sleep actually rewires the brain, decreasing anxiety literally overnight.
It Really Is Fixable
Cognitive behavioral therapy, which enables patients to cope with specific challenges and manage the impulse to worry about them; mindfulness meditation for quelling racing thoughts, letting go of negative feelings, and learning to calm oneself; and even yoga are approaches to control anxiety. In a 2020 issue of JAMA Psychiatry, investigators suggest that yoga seems to have “significant value” in reducing anxiety.
But there are even simpler things individuals can do on their own to bring down anxiety:
- Stop thinking about the “worst possible scenarios.” As life coach Renee Jain says, “Don’t believe every worried thought you have. Worried thoughts are notoriously inaccurate.”
- Remain in the present. Stress is about the future and wanting to control it. You can’t, so stop worrying about it.
- Stay positive by being busy. Do things that give you a sense of achievement—and a feeling of liberation. Volunteer in activities that help others.
- Consider the words of American poet Maya Angelou: “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, [then] change your attitude.”
- Realize when overthinking is useless. With this awareness, start to think about toning down the anxious thoughts. Repeatedly stressing over a missed flight while stuck in traffic really has no benefit to the situation. There are many life examples like this. Ask yourself, "What is to be gained by being anxious right now?"
- Exercise regularly, listen to your favorite music, and keep coffee consumption down.
- Finally, learn to relax. Hans Selye, an endocrinologist who did extensive research on stress, once said, “It’s not stress that kills us; it’s our reaction to it.”