Durham DBT, Inc.

On multiple occasions throughout my week, I talk about the Yerkes-Dodson Law ¹. It occurs to me that I should probably write up a post on this subject so that others can get a sense of what it means to have functional anxiety and when anxiety can be helpful or harmful. The “law” is not complicated, but understanding it can go a long way towards helping people who suffer from things like performance anxiety or social phobia.

Generally speaking, conventional wisdom suggests that there’s an inverse relationship between anxiety and performance. That is, the more anxiety you have, the worse your performance. That’s partly true, but only half of the story. The other half is that there is a point at which too little anxiety can affect performance as well. So, there’s a direct, as opposed to inverse, relationship between anxiety and performance. There’s a point in the middle, between the two relationships, direct and inverse, where anxiety and performance are at optimal levels.

Think of an inverted “U”, with the point in the middle being that optimal level of anxiety for peak performance. In non-psychology terms, it means that you need to feel some anxiety to do well. Think of it like this: If you are never anxious prior to taking a test, are you really going to study? Probably not. But if you’re too anxious prior to taking a test, can you study effectively? Probably not. The key is to maintain an optimal level of anxiety without going too far in one direction or another.

How does one do this? Well, there are a number of ways, but I prefer to have people practice some mindfulness meditation. In addition, working on identifying thoughts that are causing them to become more anxious than is called for by the situation (e.g., it’s perfectly understandable to worry about failing a class if you don’t do well on your final, but it’s a bit much to imagine the end of your earning potential if you fail). We call this “cognitive restructuring” in the CBT/DBT areas of psychotherapy.

Footnotes:

1. A note about wikipedia links: I like Wikipedia.org for information on various subjects, with the caveat that Wikipedia can change from the time I link to the page. As of 01/22/09, the information on Wikipedia about Yerkes-Dodson is accurate. I can’t speak to how long it will remain so, but you can always go back through the revision history and see what it said today.↩