Nervous Anticipation

 Which of the two words in this title do you most identify with? Are you someone who gets nervous when your body gets very aware of an an upcoming situation?.. or does your initial thought go to anticipation of something exciting and invigorating?

Subconscious Response -> Conscious Decision

Our bodies will subconsciously respond. When we see any conditions forming that mean something


consequential is about to happen, our subconscious brain has a programmed response. This initial response to a trigger condition is consistent for each of us and it's pretty difficult for us to control. For me, I admit that 90% of the time when my body starts responding to a future event my feelings turn to nervous anxiety rather than excited anticipation. Others I know will more often respond with excited anticipation as a default response. Every person has a different subconscious nature.

This response mechanism happens relatively often as I live my life. Certain conditions will just trigger a feeling. I may not even realize it until the feeling gets quite strong. My initial reaction is to believe that the trigger caused my feeling. For example, if someone hurls insults at me and I feel hurt, I blame that person for my hurt feelings. This seems pretty rational given our constant assessment of cause and effect. We normally use critical observation to figure out cause and response in the world around us.

It's interesting that cause and response is not fixed when it comes to feelings. The initial response is pretty deeply programmed into our subconscious but the cool thing is that your rational brain can actually change our response over time. If the initial response to any situation is nervous anxiety, I can rationally assess the situation and convince myself that the odds of something really bad happening are actually really low and a more appropriate response is actually excited anticipation.

Developing the Skill

In full disclosure, just because this shift in perspective is possible doesn't mean it's easy to do. It's a skill that needs to be practiced and learned. Here are a few ways to make this shift more successful.

1) Recognize that your body isn't feeling nervous anxiety. It is feeling hyper aware, charged up and ready to respond. This same body state can also work for the feeling of excited anticipation.

2) Imagine in your mind a positive result for the event your anticipating and imagine what steps could occur to get to this positive result. Remind yourself that this is a possible scenario and not just mind games.

3a) If the rational odds are in favor of the positive result then use those odds as assurance that the more logical response is excited anticipation.

3b) If you rationally assess the odds and a positive result is a long shot, then you can still choose to anticipate a positive result because a positive frame of mind improves your odds of succeeding.

4) With the expectation that things will go well (based on #3) allow your mind to prepare for a worst case scenario. This is different than anxiety. Your expectation is that things will turn out well but you're preparing a backstop to minimize the damage if it doesn't. Even if the worst happens you can still have confidence that there's a plan B. There's always a plan B.

5) This gets easier with practice and the theory is that after you've chosen a new path enough times it will get adopted as your default response by your subconscious mind. I haven't seen this work yet but I'm choosing to believe it's true. 

If you're like me with a strong tendency toward nervous anxiety, these 5 steps are a massive shift in the way you process the future. I know it is for me. The thing I notice about people who think this way is that they seem to be happier.

If I choose to stick with nervous anxiety, I will sometimes end up being right but I probably won't be happy and I'll still have to figure out a plan B, because a plan B always exists.