How much anxiety is “good”? When you understand how to manage it, anxiety can be creative, motivating, and help us do our best work. But we all know the downsides to out of control anxiety. Neuroscientist and professor Dr. Wendy Suzuki is the author of “Good Anxiety,” and I invited her on the podcast to help us discover our own good level of anxiety.

Please note: I’m not talking here about clinical anxiety disorders, but rather day to day or situationally based anxiety. Here what I learned:

Learn what’s the right amount of anxiety to perform at your best 

According to Suzuki, we all have an activation level-- the right amount of anxiety to perform at our best. Most of us anxious achievers live on a knife’s edge- if it goes too far we have out of control anxiety. Suzuki notes that “stress and high levels of stress hormones can literally interfere with the performance of your brain's hippocampus, critical for long-term memory” (that might be helping you remember that overall outline of your presentation, for example). But if we can channel activation energy, we really give it our all. So how do you stay on that knife's edge and stay focused?”

Suzuki explains, “There is this Dodson law of brain activation (Morra note: Yerkes Dodson rule is controversial), where if you want to perform at your max, you are not at your couch Netflix level of activity, I'm sorry. That just does not work. Also, you might be happy on the couch watching Netflix but that level of activation that is brain and body activation will not help you perform well. You need to get that energy and that energy comes from a little bit of fear, a little bit of activation, and that can come from your own anxiety.”

Practice, she says. Put yourself in those situations- know what it feels like to use that activation energy. “Call on your anxiety- where’s the fear? I need that fear to motivate me. If I’m not nervous before a talk…something's wrong. I need to generate that energy.”

Use your worry, well-- go from “What If” to a “To Do”

Wendy tells the story of a woman she calls Monica, who is a very successful lawyer. I identified a ton with Monica, because she has some obsessive tendencies that lead her to worry and question a lot-- the “what ifs.” But Monica sees this as a business asset: when she's under pressure she's identifying potential bumps ahead of time. I call this seeing around corners, and I think it's a real superpower of anxious achievers.

What if your what-if list, which is just anxiety, is really a tool that helps you do a more effective and complex evaluation of any business proposition at hand?

That anxiety is hard to live with every day. Like right before a speech, yes, I get it. But if every business meeting brings up that what-if list, it can be very stressful. How did Monica learn to manage that knife edge?

Wendy Suzuki says, the character of “Monica was inspired by a lawyer that I met at a dinner party. I was telling this very high powered lawyer that I was writing a book about anxiety. And her first words out of her mouth was, "Ah, well I'm the high paid lawyer that I am because of my anxiety. I've used it for years and years."

And I said, "Oh, do tell, what was your secret?" So she said, ‘I've always been anxious. In fact, lawyers are paid to worry about all these possible things.’ Well, she took it to heart and yes, it weighed her down but what she realized is that what she can do is instead of just obsessing over all the worries, turn every single one of those worries into a to-do.”

If Monica was defending somebody, Suzuki told me, Monica would “wonder: what if the other lawyer comes with this strategy, that strategy, the other strategy? What if the judge does this, that and that? These are all things that came up in her lawyer mind but that are addressable.”

This technique turns worry into productive action. Our brains like to worry- it’s a habit and it makes us feel productive. But worry isn’t actually useful. After learning from Monica, Suzuki now does her to-do's. She doesn’t “have time to worry about them because I’m too busy taking care of them. And I love that mental image because it transforms for me, in a second, the worry and just the wasting of time that comes with anxiety into immediate productivity. That's the superpower of productivity that comes from your own form of anxiety.”

Go from “Oh no!” to “Plenty”

For years, Suzuki had anxiety around money. It always felt scarce. She chose not to take risks and pursue exciting new ventures because of the scarcity. She had a cookbook called Plenty (fabulous cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi) and one day, she looked up, and said, “I’m going to think of Plenty from now on.”

She says, “It's a great title for a cookbook but it was my new money mantra. Because my money mantra for so many years was oh no. I at first tested the waters. What would it feel like if I changed it from oh no to plenty? What doors are you shutting because you are living like you're right on the edge of bankruptcy, which is not the case, and not at this level where you can use your money to do things that are powerful for you, powerful for your community, powerful for your life goals? And I thought oh, that sounds exciting. Let me try this plenty idea.

“In neuroscience, it’s the power of your belief system that changes not just how your brain is working but how your body responds. For many different years, the idea of money and whether I had enough would activate my anxiety and my stress system. Switching to plenty, not only was it more true to where I was, but it released me from this feeling of every time I thought or planned about money... to activation not of my fight or flight response, but activation of my creative brain.”

Channel Your Anxiety to Foster Healthy Change

Anxiety is data. Suzuki asks us to imagine: “start to realize: everything that's causing me anxiety is also an opportunity to try and do things in a different way. Maybe this first direction isn't working. That's why I'm anxious, that's why I'm fearful, and I'm trying different things."

“And that goes for all the anxieties that come up in our lives: how am I going to create the family that I want, how am I going to create the job, my dream job from this crappy job that I have right now? These are all opportunities to create because those barriers are really opportunities to do something different, to maybe do something in a way that nobody on earth has done before.”

“The skill is being able to get just enough distance from the anxiety to say this is data. Here's an opportunity to change something that might not be working or to do something different.”

“So you never want to get rid of it, in fact you can't get rid of it. Don't believe anybody who says they're going to get rid of all of your anxiety; it will always be there because it is a warning system.”

You can learn how to turn the volume down with distress tolerance techniques like breathing, mindfulness, and moving your body. “I like to say that every time you move your body, it's like you're giving your brain a wonderful bubble bath of neurochemicals,” says Suzuki.

PS: Are you a procrastinator or an over-preparer? Are your children? We all have different ways of channeling our anxiety to do our best work! Watch this wonderful TikTok from Ned Johnson, parenting expert and co-author of the Self-Driven Child to understand why it's ok to be a procrastinator....