Arsenal Football Club have spent 22 years not winning the Premier League. They have spent the past 9 months sitting on top of it. By the time they play Burnley at home on May 18, they could end the wait. Manchester City, who have collected 6 titles in the past 9 seasons, are chasing them down. The gap is 2 points and three games remain. There is also a Champions League final at the end of the month, in case the heart needed something else to do.

Into this state of North London anxiety walked Tom Hiddleston, who is an Arsenal fan and an actor, in that order. On Sky Sports’ Premier League Friday on April 17, two days before Arsenal lost 2-1 to Manchester City at the Etihad, the star of Loki and The Night Manager delivered the calmest set of remarks anyone connected to the club has produced all season.

“Pressure is a privilege, and if you feel any sort of pressure, or weight of expectation, you are breathing rare air that few of us get to live inside. In the theatre, we talk about nerves all the time, and on film sets. The chemical that you produce when you’re nervous is the same that you produce when you are excited. I choose to say that I am excited.”

The clip went viral. Arsenal fans demanded that Mikel Arteta play it in the dressing room. Hiddleston was credited with everything from emotional intelligence to a Hollywood understanding of mindset. In a moment that Ted Lasso would be proud of, he had just paraphrased one of the better-evidenced findings in performance psychology.

The Harvard karaoke study

In 2014, Alison Wood Brooks, then a young assistant professor at Harvard Business School, published a paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General called “Get Excited: Reappraising Pre-Performance Anxiety as Excitement.” She had grown interested in the standard advice given to nervous performers, presenters and athletes: calm down, relax, take a deep breath. The advice did not seem to work. People who tried to calm themselves before a high-stakes moment usually ended up worse, not better.

Brooks’ suggestion was that the body cannot really comply. The physiology of anxiety, racing heart, fast breathing, attention narrowing, is high arousal. Trying to dial it down means asking the body to undo what is already happening. Excitement is high arousal too. The two states share almost the same chemical signature, the same heart rate, the same breath, the same alertness. The only meaningful difference is the label the brain puts on the experience.

Brooks tested the idea in three experiments. In the first, participants were sent into a karaoke booth to perform a song. They were told to say one of three things to themselves before they began: “I am anxious,” “I am calm,” or “I am excited.” The people who said “I am excited” sang noticeably better, scored objectively by Nintendo Wii’s pitch-detection software. The “calm” group did no better than the “anxious” group.

In the second experiment, 188 participants tackled a difficult timed maths problem after reading either “try to get excited” or “try to remain calm.” The “get excited” group scored higher. In the third, public-speaking subjects who said they were excited spoke for longer, more persuasively, and were rated more competent and more relaxed by independent observers than those who tried to calm down.

The same body with a different mindset achieved a positive outcome.

The body actually behaves differently

If Brooks named the trick, Jeremy Jamieson at the University of Rochester showed why it works at the physiological level. Across more than a decade of studies in his Social Stress Labab, Jamieson has shown that reappraising stress arousal as a resource, telling yourself the racing heart is your body preparing to perform rather than warning you to flee, produces measurable changes in cardiovascular response.

People who reframe stress show what physiologists call a “challenge” pattern: the heart pumps with greater efficiency, blood vessels dilate, blood flow to the brain increases. People who do not show a “threat” pattern: the heart works harder for less output, vessels constrict, oxygen delivery drops. The body is, quite literally, preparing differently for the same situation, depending on how the mind has classified the moment.

Jamieson and his colleagues have replicated the effect in students sitting the GRE, in subjects exposed to the brutal Trier Social Stress Test, and in college classroom exam settings. A short reframing instruction, given before the event, changes both performance and the underlying physiology. The cardiovascular signature of a reappraised arouser looks different on the equipment. The body is producing better blood flow, a steadier heart pattern, more oxygen to the brain, depending on how the mind has framed what is happening.

Psychologist Alia Crum and colleagues at Stanford University has extended the same logic to whole-of-life stress mindsets. In her best-known study, a short video intervention teaching financial-services employees that stress can enhance performance produced effects that, by stress-research standards, were unusually large: improvements in self-reported wellbeing, fewer health complaints, and better supervisor-rated work output, all sustained beyond the intervention period.

What this means for Arsenal and for the rest of us

Hiddleston spoke two days before Arsenal lost at Manchester City on April 19, a second consecutive defeat that, watching at the time, looked like the title slipping away. By the first week of May they were back on top of the table with threegames to play, having won what they needed to win.

Whether they finish the job at home to Burnley, or away to Crystal Palace, the squad has spent a month working through exactly the sort of pressure Hiddleston was describing. The privilege of the position they are in could soon see them lifting the trophy.

For everyone else, the practical version is shorter than you would think. Consider three things to try the next time you are nervous, whether for a job interview, a presentation or meeting a tight deadline.

First, change the verb. Your body’s high arousal is already there. Saying “I am calm” or “I am fine” requires the body to undo what it is doing. Saying “I am excited” matches the label to the existing physiology. Brooks’ karaoke booth confirmed this is more than positive thinking. The research subjects who whispered “I am excited” really did sing better.

Second, name what the racing heart is for. Reappraisal works best when you tell yourself, specifically, that the arousal is there to help you. The blood flow is increasing because the brain is sharpening. The breath is fast because the body is prepared. Jamieson’s data show the cardiovascular system responds.

Third, choose the frame before you need it. Arousal reappraisal is much easier in the rehearsal room than under the lights. Decide in advance what you will say to yourself when the nerves arrive. The brain accepts the label more readily when it has been pre-loaded.

What Billie Jean would say

Billie Jean King coined “pressure is a privilege” at a Fed Cup tie in Las Vegas in 2000, decades before Hiddleston borrowed it. Lindsay Davenport, about to play Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario, an opponent she had trouble beating, asked her captain to say something useful. King said the line without thinking, then loved it, and has used it ever since. It’s engraved on a silver plaque near the player tunnel at Arthur Ashe Stadium and is the namesake of the trophy formerly known as the Fed Cup. Davenport won the match 6-2, 1-6, 6-3, having played some of her best tennis in the third set.

The line is now Hiddleston’s, too, and Mikel Arteta’s whether or not he wants it. The physiology is the same in a karaoke booth, in a public speech, in the 75th minute of a title decider, and in the next moment in your own week when your heart starts going faster than feels comfortable.

What Arsenal have shown across the past three weeks, regardless of which trophy ends up in the cabinet by the end of May, is what happens when a team picks the right label. Their April was awful, but they are still in front.

The chemical underneath the pressure is an asset. We get to choose what we call it.

Interested in this topic? You might also like…