Last week I woke up in the middle of the night nervous that I was not nervous about a speech I had to make.
The thought that I was giving a speech in a few hours floated between my ears and in an instant I fell into a hole of nervousness because I was not nervous.
It was as if I had tried to step over a crack in the sidewalk, but as I stepped, the crack widened and became a hole. And in I went, heart pounding. I had to get out of bed and labor over the speech, beginning to end.
My wife Sharon had the same experience teaching her first class of the semester at a college where she is a new faculty member. She reported that she delivered the class without any of her usual pizzaz and efforts to entertain. The next morning, she mentioned she was concerned about how the class went because she herself had not been hyped up with energy. Essentially, she was nervous that she had not been nervous.
What’s going on?
Could it be calmness and worthiness are staging a coup within us, and toppling the tyrant anxiety? And anxiety is fighting back in order to prolong his reign?
And could anxiety have been doing some good, pushing us to excel. Could his demanding nature have driven us toward excellence, when we might have otherwise settled for good enough.
We are getting older. Maybe we are becoming more unflappable, more able to face our challenges knowing that nothing is as bad as it seems, or as important.
While there may be less going on in my speech and her class than meets the eye, some anxiety is good before-hand. Psychologists call it anticipatory anxiety: it’s what drives you to prepare, to rehearse, to think of all the stuff you need to do a good job, to anticipate possible problems and take preventive action.
However, if you have too much anticipatory anxiety, you will not be able to concentrate. If that happens, you will not be able to prepare well, and that could cause you to have a difficult time in performance.
Once you step onto the stage–whatever it is–a small amount of performance anxiety will fill you with adrenalin and give you an extra shot of energy, but too much and you will not be able to do justice to your own abilities.
So anticipatory anxiety is useful in planning, and performance anxiety is useful in delivering a talk or a class, but only in modest amounts. If you have too little of either you may lack the necessary oomph, and with too much, you may crash and burn.
It is wise to wear life like a loose garment, to care–but not too much.