Alison Wood Brooks, a colleague of mine at Harvard Business School, also happens to be a talented singer. She’s logged hundreds of hours in front of audiences, and her poise on stage is enviable. As both a performer and a psychologist, Brooks appreciates not only how that kind of poise can make for good leadership, but also how many of us struggle to find it when we’re performing. So she set out to find some simple changes that might help people overcome their performance anxiety.

If you’re a fan of the superviral “keep calm” meme, you’ll likely be surprised by what she found.

As most of us know, stage fright can feel like a paralyzing overdose of anxiety. And what do people tell us to do when we’re anxious? They tell us, with good intentions, to calm down. As it turns out, that might just be the very worst thing they can say.

You see, anxiety is what psychologists describe as a high‑arousal emotion. When we’re anxious, we occupy a heightened state of physiological vigilance. We’re hyper-alert. Our hearts race, we break out in a sweat, our cortisol may spike—all these reactions are controlled automatically by our nervous system. And it’s virtually impossible for most people to shut off that kind of automatic arousal, to abruptly de-escalate it.

Not only can we not calm down, but when someone tells us to calm down, it also reminds us of how calm we are not, which stokes our anxiety even more.

But there’s another high‑arousal emotion that’s not so negative. In fact, it’s quite positive: excitement. Brooks predicted that we may not be able to extinguish arousal, but we should be able to change the way we interpret it. So rather than fruitlessly trying to change the arousal level of our emotional states from high to low, what if we try to change them from negative to positive? From anxiety to excitement?

To test her prediction, Brooks ran a series of experiments, putting subjects in several situations that elicit stage fright: a singing competition (in which they sang Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”), a public‑speaking contest, and a difficult math exam. In each experiment, subjects were randomly assigned to tell themselves one of three things before their “performance”: (1) to keep calm, (2) to get excited, or (3) nothing.