There’s a loophole in the anxiety model: sometimes what feels like anxiety is actually excitement that you’re not letting yourself feel fully. This shows up precisely when you’re stepping into a bigger room—a new job, relationship, way of being—where you’re being invited to expand.
Joe describes a friend with chronic stage fright. The instruction was simple: next time on stage, fill the whole room, feel like you are the entire room.
“They were like, ‘Oh, the anxiety’s gone. Actually, I was really excited to be up on stage.’ And that’s the clue. The clue is that often times, we’re anxious when we’re actually deeply excited.”
The fix is almost embarrassingly concrete: feel the excitement rather than label the sensation as anxiety. You can flip it by simply saying “I’m excited” about ten times.
“But if we feel the excitement, the anxiety goes away completely… you’ll notice that all that anxiety turns into excitement.”
So one of the two great sources of anxiety isn’t a problem with your life at all—it’s expansion knocking, felt only halfway. Let the feeling complete and the anxiety resolves into the excitement it always was.
Related Concepts
- Fear is excitement without the breath
- Imposter fear is excitement without the breath
- Anxiety is a signal that your life is out of alignment
- Anxiety is often repressed excitement
- Feeling excitement cracks the identity open
- Saying ‘I’m excited’ while feeling it can unkink anxiety
- Breathing into anxiety to enjoy it turns it into excitement