I told myself “I am not nervous. I am excited.”

My heart was pounding out of my chest today.

I had just walked into a room full of dermatologists, experts in their field, people who spend their careers reading skin, reading faces, for signals of what’s wrong. And I was about to stand in front of them and talk about the use of AI in their practice.

Before I walked up, I repeated quietly to myself, the way I have been doing for years whenever my nervous system starts getting into overdrive: I am not nervous. I am excited.

It was as simple as that.

Here’s why it works. Anxiety and excitement are physiologically almost identical. Elevated heart rate. Adrenaline. Heightened alertness. Your body doesn’t know the difference between dread and anticipation, because at the level of your nervous system, they are the same state.

Alison Wood Brooks at Harvard ran a series of studies on exactly this, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, and what she found was that people who reframed their pre-performance anxiety as excitement, just by saying “I am excited” out loud, performed meaningfully better than those who tried to calm down. In singing, in public speaking, in math. The reframe works because it doesn’t ask your body to do something impossible, like lower your heart rate on command. It just asks you to relabel what’s already happening and point it somewhere useful.

The other thing Brooks found: more than 90% of people believe the right move before a high-stakes moment is to try to relax. Almost nobody naturally reaches for excitement. We have been trained, culturally and otherwise, to treat nerves as something to suppress rather than a signal to redirect.

The second thing I reminded myself of is older, and I don’t have a research citation for it, because it’s just something that works for me.

Those people were there to hear what I had to say. They chose to be in that room. That is a gift, and I don’t use that word loosely.

I have been speaking long enough to know that audiences almost always want you to succeed, not because they are being generous, but because nobody comes to a talk hoping to watch someone struggle. They are there because the topic matters to them. Because they gave up time, which is the one thing you cannot get back, to hear you think out loud about something.

When I remembered that, the last sliver of anxiety melted.

I looked around the room while I was speaking. People were looking at me, not at their phones. That calmed me even further.

At the end, there was a long clap. Several people came to find me after, to say thank you or to keep talking. One of them asked how she could enter the field I am in now. We talked for ten minutes.

I walked out feeling grateful to have stepped out of my comfort zone.

Nerves are often the evidence that something matters. The reframe is always available to you, even backstage, even thirty seconds before, even in the middle of a sentence if you need it.

You are not nervous. You are just excited. And those people, they are there to cheer you on.