I recently came across a therapist’s suggestion that made me laugh because it is both slightly ridiculous and psychologically plausible: if you are prone to anxiety, try doing more things for fun. Go to the interview for fun. Exercise for fun. Start the blog for fun. The idea underneath it was that anxiety feeds on importance, and I think there is something useful hiding inside that sentence, provided we do not turn it into yet another rule we are supposed to perform correctly.
The Imaginary Future We Bring Into the Room
Consider what happens before something we care about. The event begins as a fairly concrete thing: an interview, a presentation, a first date, an application, a class. Then the mind starts adding material. The interview may determine whether I get the job. The job may determine what happens next in my career. The people interviewing me may form an opinion about my abilities. Now I must make a good impression. I must answer intelligently. I must not say anything foolish. By the time we actually arrive at the interview, we are no longer carrying one conversation into the room. We are carrying an imaginary future, our professional identity, several possible humiliations, and a committee of invented witnesses.
That is a lot to bring to an interview.
Doing it “for fun” does not require pretending that you do not want the job. You probably do want it. Prepare carefully. Read about the company. Understand the role. Think about the questions you want to ask. Then allow another possibility into the room: I am also here to see what these people are like. Suddenly, you have something to investigate. How do they talk about their work? Do they answer questions directly? Do they seem interested in one another? Is this an environment where you can imagine spending a large portion of your waking life? You have not made the interview unimportant. You have made it two-sided again.
The Peculiar Difficulty of Being a Beginner
Learning is another place where excessive importance can make perfectly enjoyable things miserable. Adults who are highly competent in one part of life can become strangely reluctant to enter situations in which they know absolutely nothing. Children have no such dignity. Give a child a paintbrush and instructions she does not understand, and she will usually begin painting anyway. Give an accomplished adult the same paintbrush, and there is a reasonable chance she will first want to know the proper technique, the preferred materials, whether there is a beginner tutorial, and why everyone else’s tree already looks more like a tree.
Take the class anyway.
Choose something for which you have no obvious talent. Ceramics is excellent because clay is completely indifferent to your résumé. Learn to dance and discover that your feet have apparently been receiving conflicting instructions for years. Try baking bread and produce an object that could reasonably be classified as masonry. None of this requires a larger lesson. You tried something. You were not immediately good at it. The world remained operational.
Movement Without a Transformation Program
Exercise becomes easier to understand once we remove some of the cultural baggage attached to it. A person can go for a walk because walking feels good. You can swim because you like water. You can lift weights without announcing a transformation, buying six coordinated outfits, or deciding that your entire personality now requires protein powder. Movement does not become more legitimate because an app has recorded it. Sometimes twenty minutes is twenty minutes, and that is the entire event.
Creativity Without a Business Case
Creative work may benefit even more from this attitude because creativity becomes peculiar when every experiment is asked to justify its existence. Suppose you want to start a blog about abandoned buildings, eighteenth-century recipes, insects, handbags, forgotten court cases, terrible product design, or whatever subject has been occupying an unreasonable amount of your attention. You do not need a content strategy before you have written the first paragraph. You can write because you want to find out what you think.
This is particularly difficult for people who are accustomed to producing useful things. We learn to ask very quickly what an idea is for. Can it become an article? A business? A research project? A publication? Sometimes those are sensible questions. They are simply different questions from the one that produced the curiosity in the first place. There can be a period during which an idea is allowed to exist without presenting a business case.
Make something that has no obvious destination. Draw badly. Write a page about something that fascinates you and show it to nobody. Photograph peculiar mailboxes. Build the unnecessarily detailed spreadsheet ranking every croissant you encounter. Spend an afternoon learning why octopuses change color. You are under no contractual obligation to turn your interest in octopuses into a podcast.
Asking for Things Without Inventing the Rejection First
The same principle can change the experience of asking for things. People often avoid applying for a position, fellowship, program, grant, speaking invitation, or other opportunity because they begin imagining the meaning of rejection before they have even submitted the application. Rejection certainly can disappoint us. What it cannot do is provide a comprehensive assessment of a human being.
An application is a request made under particular circumstances to a particular group of people who are making a particular selection. That is all the information their answer can reliably contain. Send the application because you are curious about what will happen. You may get the opportunity. You may receive a polite no. You may hear absolutely nothing and discover that the modern world has perfected the art of rejection through administrative silence. In every case, you still exist afterward.
Conversations With People Who Have Not Read the Script
Then there are conversations, which anxiety is very good at rehearsing. We imagine what we will say, what the other person might say, what we will say in response to that, and what they will probably say after our response. At some point, we have constructed an entire theatrical production involving someone who has not yet delivered a single actual line.
Preparation can help when a conversation is consequential. Rehearsing every possible human reaction cannot. People are inconveniently unscripted. They misunderstand us in ways we did not anticipate and occasionally understand us far better than we expected. A useful experiment is to know the one thing you genuinely need to communicate, then enter the conversation and allow the other person to participate in it.
The Smaller Experiments of Everyday Life
Everyday life offers easier places to practice lowering the stakes. Wear something you have been saving for a special occasion and allow the occasion to be that you wanted to wear it. Cook an elaborate meal with no guests coming. Go to a museum alone and ignore the imaginary obligation to appreciate everything. Spend forty minutes with one object, then walk straight past the next room because nothing in it interests you. Order something unfamiliar and discover that you dislike it. You have acquired information.
Ask the question that feels embarrassingly elementary. Sometimes the answer will indeed be elementary, which is convenient because now you know it. Sometimes the person explaining it will pause halfway through and realize that the answer is more complicated than everyone had assumed. Questions have a wonderful habit of exposing where understanding actually ends.
And then there is plain silliness, which adults ration much too carefully. Give the sourdough starter a formal title. Keep an absurdly serious ranking of neighborhood squirrels. Invent household prizes for mundane achievements. Make a terrible drawing of your dog from memory and compare it with the animal currently staring at you in disappointment. None of this needs to improve you.
That last sentence may be the hardest one.
When Everything Becomes an Improvement Program
We have become remarkably good at converting pleasures into improvement programs. Reading becomes a reading goal. Walking becomes a step count. Cooking becomes meal preparation. Writing becomes content. Rest becomes recovery. Even hobbies can acquire performance metrics if we leave them unattended long enough.
Fun is unusual because it does not necessarily produce evidence.
What Anxiety Adds to the Experience
This brings us back to anxiety. Anxiety often works by increasing the imagined consequences of an uncertain event. The mind does not merely ask what will happen; it tries to calculate what that outcome will mean about everything that comes afterward. Because the future is unavailable for inspection, imagination fills the gap, and imagination is capable of producing considerably more material than reality requested.
Approaching something partly for fun changes the question. Instead of requiring the experience to confirm something about you, you can become interested in the experience itself. What happens if I go? What happens if I ask? What happens if I try this badly? What happens if I stop preparing and begin?
There are situations in which the stakes really are high, and no amount of playful reframing changes them. There are also thousands of ordinary situations in which we have added several floors of consequence to a one-story building.
A Small Experiment for the Coming Week
For a week, try catching yourself in the construction process. When you find yourself rehearsing endlessly, avoiding something because you might look inexperienced, or imagining a chain of consequences that extends far beyond the event in front of you, change the question.
Further Reading: Six Findings From Psychological Research
1. The meaning we assign to stress changes our physiological response.
In a 2012 experiment, Jeremy Jamieson, Matthew Nock, and Wendy Berry Mendes found that participants instructed to interpret stress-related arousal as useful exhibited more adaptive cardiovascular responses, including increased cardiac efficiency and reduced vascular resistance, than controls. This provides experimental support for the interview example: the interpretation of an event influences more than our private thoughts.
Source: Jamieson, J. P., Nock, M. K., & Mendes, W. B. (2012). Mind over matter: Reappraising arousal improves cardiovascular and cognitive responses to stress. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(3), 417–422.
2. Excitement can be a more useful response to performance anxiety than trying to calm down.
Harvard researcher Alison Wood Brooks conducted experiments involving public speaking, karaoke singing, and mathematics. Participants who reframed anxiety as excitement performed better than those instructed to calm themselves. The shift encouraged an opportunity-oriented rather than threat-oriented interpretation. This complements the suggestion to enter an interview looking for something interesting to discover.
Source: Brooks, A. W. (2014). Get excited: Reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(3), 1144–1158.
3. Adult playfulness is associated with better responses to stress.
A study of 694 adults found that greater playfulness was associated with higher perceived self-efficacy, lower helplessness, and more adaptive coping strategies. A separate 2024 publication examined two workplace samples of 185 and 355 people and also found associations between playfulness and constructive coping. These studies are correlational, but they support the broader premise that playful engagement and psychological adaptability are related.
Sources:
Clifford, C., Paulk, E., Frazier, L. D., & Lin, Q. (2022). Relationships among adult playfulness, stress, and coping during the COVID-19 pandemic.
New insights into the contributions of playfulness to dealing with stress at work: Correlates of self- and peer-rated playfulness and coping strategies (2024).
4. Turning enjoyable activities into reward-seeking exercises can diminish interest.
In a classic 1973 experiment, Mark Lepper, David Greene, and Richard Nisbett studied children who already enjoyed drawing. Those who expected a reward for drawing subsequently showed less intrinsic interest than children receiving unexpected rewards or none. The effect is context-dependent, but the finding gives scientific substance to the observation about turning reading, walking, and hobbies into performance programs.
Source: Lepper, M. R., Greene, D., & Nisbett, R. E. (1973). Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward: A test of the “overjustification” hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28(1), 129–137.
5. Perfectionism has two different relationships with procrastination.
A 2017 meta-analysis distinguished perfectionistic concerns, involving worries about mistakes and evaluation, from perfectionistic strivings, involving high personal standards. Across studies, concerns were positively associated with procrastination (r = 0.23), while strivings were negatively associated (r = −0.22). This distinction supports a particularly useful point: preparation and high standards can coexist with playfulness. Fear of being judged is a different psychological process.
Source: Sirois, F. M., Molnar, D. S., & Hirsch, J. K. (2017). A meta-analytic and conceptual update on the associations between procrastination and multidimensional perfectionism. European Journal of Personality, 31(2), 137–159.
6. Curiosity includes a willingness to engage with uncertainty.
Todd Kashdan and colleagues developed a measure distinguishing the motivation to seek new knowledge from the willingness to embrace unfamiliar, unpredictable experiences. Their research found positive associations with psychological flexibility, openness, autonomy, and personal growth. The suggestion to approach an interview, a conversation, or a class with curiosity therefore has a stronger foundation than simply telling someone to relax.
Source: Kashdan, T. B., Gallagher, M. W., Silvia, P. J., Winterstein, B. P., Breen, W. E., Terhar, D., & Steger, M. F. (2009). The Curiosity and Exploration Inventory-II: Development, factor structure, and psychometrics. Journal of Research in Personality, 43(6), 987–998.
