The surprising benefits of anxiety and how you could harness them

WHEN we are worrying about an upcoming deadline or feeling overcome before an exam, it can seem absurd, almost insulting, to imagine that this has any advantages.

There can be no doubt that extreme anxiety is highly debilitating. At moderate levels, however, our nervous feelings can make us smarter problem-solvers and fuel original thinking. Anxiety may even benefit our health.

To understand why, we can see anxiety as a kind of alarm bell. It draws our attention to a situation that requires action, and greater sensitivity to those signals helps us respond more rapidly. “The physiological arousal and worrying thoughts operate quicker than our conscious evaluation of how demanding a situation is and whether we have the resources to handle it,” says Todd Kashdan, director of the Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University in Virginia. “This heightened awareness helps us make more informed decisions.”

As evidence, Kashdan points to research that tested undergraduates’ anxiety levels before tricking them into believing that they had infected a computer with a virus. Those who were more anxious ignored distractions when on their way to tell the IT team about the problem.

Similar reasoning may explain why one aspect of the personality trait neuroticism – related to worry and vulnerability – was found in another study to be linked to lower mortality during the study period. If you are constantly worried about your health, you might be more likely to seek medical help at the first sign of symptoms, which allows you to receive more effective treatment.

The benefits of anxiety

How about performance anxiety – those nerves we feel before an important event? “Anxiety can be the nudge we need to prepare for an upcoming presentation, or the push to have a difficult conversation we’ve been avoiding,” says Kashdan. “In this way, anxiety can be a catalyst for growth and improvement.”

Whether or not we experience those benefits may depend on the way that we “appraise” our own anxiety. Imagine, for example, that you are a designer and you have been asked to pitch a new product. The stakes are high. Your tension inevitably builds and your creativity drops as the deadline approaches.

Anxiety can boost performance

There are two ways to interpret your feelings. You may assume that you can only function when calm and that feelings of nervous tension are a sign of imminent failure, fuelling further anxiety. You might begin procrastinating, feeling so helpless that you ignore the alarm.

Alternatively, you might accept that a certain level of anxiety is part of the creative process. You see your nervous feelings as a source of energy that keep you focused and looking for better solutions. Whenever doubts surface, you remind yourself of your previous successes and focus on the potential rewards.

There are good scientific reasons to take this positive mindset. Many of our anxious feelings are the result of “physiological arousal”, which can boost performance. A racing heart, for example, pumps more oxygenated blood to the brain, which could help fuel better thinking. People who recognise those benefits tend to do better under pressure.

Our appraisals are malleable. In one study, 113 people took part in a mock job interview involving a presentation followed by questions – an exercise that would make most people feel anxious. Afterwards, they took a standard test of original thinking that involved inventing unusual uses for a newspaper. Those who had been primed to see their nervous feelings as a potential resource before the interview tended to give more original answers.

Reappraisal can also benefit people who are anxious about exams. When students were taught that nervous feelings can energise the mind before taking a maths test, they had better results and lower levels of “maths evaluation anxiety” – which is when the mind goes blank during a maths test – than those who weren’t primed. First-year college students who had been taught to reappraise their feelings similarly got better results on their exams than those who hadn’t.

Learning to reappraise our anxious feelings may bring greater long-term resilience. A study of doctors and teachers found that those who viewed their anxiety as a source of information and energy were at a lower risk of exhaustion and burnout over the following 12 months. Once we have listened to the body’s alarm and acted on its message, we can take time to relax – and leave our worrying for another day.