Unless if you're a psychopath, there's a chance that you know what it's like to feel anxious about something. Here's the thing about anxiety: Too much of it tends to affect our brain's working memory and information processing capacities, which we in turn affects our ability to perform well in any task that requires thinking.

Most experts recommend that calming down is the best way to deal with anxiety, but new research shows that psyching yourself up might actually be more beneficial in dealing with all this nervousness.

This discovery was made by Alison Wood Brooks, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who had subjects perform stress-inducing tasks such as singing karaoke, giving a speech, and taking a math test.  The findings showed that subjects who psyched themselves up rather than tried to calm themselves down were more likely to see evaluative situations as opportunities rather than threats, a mindset that in other research has correlated with better performance.
Brooks' explanation for this is that we can trick ourselves into perceiving anxiety, at least partially, as excitement. While calm feels nothing like anxiety, excitement feels sort of like it. Calm is a low arousal state; anxiety and excitement are high-arousal states. As a result, changing anxiety into calm requires flipping both the intensity (high to low) and the valence (negative to positive). Changing anxiety into excitement just requires one of those flips. The two emotions are, as Brooks puts it, "arousal contingent." Those butterflies in your stomach? That's not apprehension; it's anticipation. Interestingly, Brooks found that subjects who psyched themselves up didn't feel any less anxious; they just felt excited in addition, and that seems to have drowned out the nerves.
So the next time you're feeling nervous about your performance, try embracing those jangling nerves instead of quieting them. You might just end up surprising yourself!

[Mashable]