Excitement: what it means and how to respond

Energy aimed at something good

Excitement is the night before a trip, the moment the band walks onstage, the first day of a job you really wanted. It is anticipation turned up to full volume. You are expecting something good, and your body is getting ready for it.

Excitement and nerves feel alike

Excitement usually brings a faster heartbeat, a jittery stomach, quick breathing, and restlessness. Those are almost the same sensations as nervousness. The difference lies mostly in what you expect: something good, or something that could go wrong.

That overlap is useful. Brooks found, across studies of karaoke singing, public speaking, and math tasks, that people who reframed their pre-performance anxiety as excitement, for example by saying “I am excited” out loud, felt more excited and performed better than people who tried to calm down (Brooks, 2014). These were lab experiments, but the trick is easy to try.

What excitement signals

Excitement tells you what you are looking forward to and how much energy you are ready to invest. Looking forward can be its own pleasure: in five experiments, Van Boven and Ashworth found that people reported more intense emotions when looking forward to events than when looking back on them, partly because they imagined future events more fully (Van Boven and Ashworth, 2007).

Not everyone prizes excitement equally. In cross-cultural surveys, European Americans tended to value high-arousal states like excitement more than Hong Kong Chinese participants did (Tsai, Knutson, and Fung, 2006). If you are a calmer person surrounded by people who want everything to be thrilling, your quieter enthusiasm still counts.

Excitement can also crowd out judgment. People sign up for the marathon, adopt the puppy, or agree to the side project at the peak of the feeling. None of those are bad choices, but the energy that makes the decision feel obvious will fade, and the commitment will still be there.

Excitement, anticipation, and anxiety

Anticipation is the broader experience of looking ahead, which can be calm. Excitement is anticipation with high energy. Anxiety shares the energy but expects something bad. Joy is what excitement often turns into once the good thing actually arrives.

Example: the first gig

Before her first open mic, Zoe's hands are shaking and she wants to leave. Her friend says, “You're nervous.” Zoe says, “No, I'm excited. My heart is going because this matters.” She still shakes through the first verse. By the second, the energy is going into her voice instead of her knees.

Three ways to channel excitement

1. Name it as excitement when the stakes are a chance, not a danger. Try saying “I'm excited” out loud before a performance or pitch.
2. Give the energy somewhere to go: rehearse once more, pack the bag, walk around the block.
3. Watch for overcommitting. Excitement can make you say yes to everything; sleep on big decisions made in its peak.

Words you could use

• “I'm excited. My heart is pounding because this matters to me.”
• “I can't stop thinking about the trip. Want to look at the map with me?”
• “Let me sleep on it. I'm too excited to decide well right now.”

A reflection prompt

When my heart races before something important, do I call it nerves or excitement, and does the label change how it goes?

The EQTiger dimension it relates to

Excitement relates to Emotional Regulation: steering high energy toward the task without letting it rush your decisions. Read what the regulation score describes.