Dealing with Butterflies
I recently took my son to a play date. After a year-and-a-half without this kind of social interaction, I wasn’t surprised when he confessed that he was feeling nervous beforehand. I’d had a similar experience when heading to my first post-vaccine dinner party. But thanks to research by the amazing Alison Wood Brooks of Harvard Business School, I had a trick up my sleeve that I was able to share with my son and use myself to quell some of those butterflies. It involved relabeling anxiety. Alison dives into the details in our interview below.
Before getting to Alison’s insights and research, I’m sharing a few recent highlights from my virtual book tour and a bit of news on how behavioral science can help encourage vaccination.
Recent Highlights from My Book Tour
I’ve been floored and honored by all the excitement How to Change has generated in the last month. The Financial Times named it one of the 10 best books on business to pick up this summer and Amazon labeled it one of the 20 best business and leadership books of 2021 so far. It also made The Behavioral Scientist’s summer book list as well as Adam Grant’s personal list of 12 books every leader should read this summer. Hopefully that gives you plenty of ammunition for convincing all your friends to pick up a copy of How to Change!
If you’re curious about the latest activity on my virtual book tour, here are a few of my favorite listens and reads that have been released since my last newsletter:
Science Rules!: I chatted with Bill Nye about the science of behavior change on his popular podcast.
TED Ideas: An adapted excerpt from my book explains why asking people for advice builds their confidence and competence.
A Slight Change of Plans: Google’s Maya Shankar peppered me with questions about change on her fantastic new podcast from Pushkin Pods.
Financial Decoder: I got to chat with Charles Schwab's Mark Riepe on Choiceology’s sister podcast, Financial Decoder, about insights from How to Change that are particularly relevant to financial decision making.
How to Encourage Vaccinations
What am I doing when I’m not out promoting the book? I’m exploring how to best encourage vaccination. Here are some highlights:
Text Messages Nudging Vaccination: This Washington Post op-ed summarizes what my co-authors and I have learned about how text messages can boost vaccination rates.
My CNN Debut: Discover what we know about the value of vaccine incentives and lotteries.
The Philly Vax Sweepstakes: Read about the sweepstakes my collaborators and I designed to encourage vaccination in Philadelphia and to facilitate evaluation.
Q&A: Reframing Anxiety
In this Q&A from Choiceology with Harvard Business School Professor Alison Wood Brooks, we talk about her research on how reframing anxiety can be a handy tactic for dealing with those butterflies.
Me: You’ve studied how to reappraise or reframe anxiety. Could you explain how that works?
Alison: One of the questions I’ve pursued in my research is: What strategies can people use to successfully reappraise their emotions and think about their feelings in a different way—in a way that might influence their behavior positively?
One way is just talking about your feelings differently. The way we label our emotions verbally to ourselves, out loud and to other people is consequential. So, when someone says, “Hey, how are you feeling?” If you say, “Oh my gosh, I'm so nervous,” it actually influences how you feel. You will continue to feel nervous. Whereas if you say, “You know what, I'm really excited,” it turns out just saying that out loud tricks your brain into believing that you actually are excited. And people report feeling more excited. They show physiological signs of being more excited.
Me: That’s really interesting. Could you describe some of the research you’ve done looking at how reframing emotions can change people’s performance?
Alison: Absolutely. In my dissertation work, I was really excited to study the fine line between pre-performance anxiety and pre-performance excitement and see how it influences performance on consequential tasks.
So, we looked at a number of performance domains. I started with one that was very near and dear to my heart, which is singing. Singing in front of other people makes almost everybody nervous, even good singers. We asked people to sing a karaoke song, a really hard song—“Don't Stop Believing”—in front of a small audience in our lab. And before they sang, they were required to label their emotion in a certain way. A subset of the participants were required to say, “I'm really nervous about this.” A different subset of participants were required to say, “I'm really excited about this.” And a third subset said, “I'm trying to calm down,” or, “I'm feeling really calm.”
What we found is that people who said they were excited out loud actually sang better.
Me: I love that study. What else did you find?
Alison: In the second study, we asked people to give a short public speech in our lab. Again, we did the intervention where we had people reappraise their anxiety as excitement or try to calm down. Calming down is the sort of natural response people have when they feel anxious before a task. It’s a very strong human instinct. But calming down is really hard and requires two steps. You have to change your mindset from negative to positive, right? Anxiety is negative. Calmness is positive. You also have to reduce your physiological signs of anxiety, which is very, very difficult, if not impossible. Instead, the insight here is: let’s stop trying to control your body and just run with the racing heart, run with the sweaty palms, and just think of it differently. Move from that negative valence of anxiety to a positive valence of excitement.
So we did this with karaoke singing, we did it with public speaking, and then I became curious. I wondered if it’s just effective for tasks you do in front of other people? So, I repeated the procedure with a math task and used difficult GRE questions to see how people performed. And again, we found that people who reappraise their anxiety as excitement, even privately, just on their own, sitting at a desk, actually performed better on the math task.
Me: Why do you think this simple technique of telling yourself you’re excited when you start feeling anxious works?
Alison: When we feel anxious, we tend to focus on how things might go badly. We focus on all the ways that we might totally blow it. On the other hand, when you feel excited, you tend to focus on the opportunities—the positive. You think—wow, everyone might applaud for me. They might be really amazed at my effort and enthusiasm. They might see that I’m having fun up here. You think about how maybe you could really get more than half of these math questions right. In thinking about those positive possibilities, it turns out that you’re more likely to actually execute them. This reappraisal idea between anxiety and excitement, it triggers the difference between a threat mindset and an opportunity mindset.
To learn more about the power of relabeling anxiety as excitement, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into the topic.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
That’s all for this month’s newsletter, and I’ll be taking the summer off from Milkman Delivers. I look forward to being back in touch in September!
Katy Milkman, PhD
Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author of How to Change.