I am ashamed to admit I have, more than once, committed the egregious social, intimate relationship, workplace relationship, and parental sin, of telling someone in full sympathetic nervous system arousal, that they should just calm down.
You may throw tomatoes, and possibly soft apples, now.
It is possibly the least useful instruction available to a person who isn’t calm. It’s well intended (of course! well, usually), vague, hard to execute, and can quietly make things worse by telling someone that the bodily response they’re having is itself evidence they aren’t coping, while simultaneously asking them to use the cognitive resources they don’t have access to right now to manage themselves.
Needless to say, it rarely works and there are other, way better strategies to deploy. Co-regulation for example, which is especially good for kids.
Think about it from the performance under pressure angle
For performance under pressure, the target is different. It’s not about removing arousal, but regulating it well enough to still do the work.
Pressure produces ordinary physiological changes, which we call sympathetic arousal, due to your sympathetic nervous system kicking off. You’ve heard of the fight-flight mechanism, which is another name we use for it. This is like pressing the gas pedal on your car. Heart rate rises, breathing changes, attention sharpens, energy mobilises. It is a magnificent, balletic response to what’s going on. None of that is failure.
However, there is a story that many people carry, which is that calm equals control, and arousal equals losing it.
So you’re on duty, on call, and the phone goes at 2am. Your heart is already going before the caller finishes the first sentence. Now there are two jobs running. One is working out what’s actually happening and the other is a monitoring loop asking “am I calm yet?” Those two jobs compete for the same attention, and only one of them is the work you have to do.
What if we just suppress one?
Glad you asked.
The research offers better options than suppression. James Gross’s process model sorts strategies by where they act. Suppression arrives late. The emotion is already well developed and you inhibit the outward expression of it. Compared with not regulating at all, that leaves negative feeling where it was, raises sympathetic nervous system activity, increases activation in the amygdala, and leaves you with worse memory. You’ve probably done this and know how challenging it can be. Draining, even.
By contrast, reappraisal acts earlier, on meaning.
Side note: You’ve very likely heard of cognitive reappraisal. It’s old magic, now used extensively in cognitive behavioural therapy and it’s an outstanding tool. Of all the self-help tools available, it is one of the best. Many other self-help tools are reappraisal re-clothed in a suit, or leathers, or upcycled, or pretty floral numbers, depending on which trendy book or influencer you’re into. But there is nuance here, so I’m choosing my words carefully.
I’m being precise, specifically, because there is a squadron of pop “psychologists” with an arsenal of 30 second TikToks to launch into this arena. Arousal reappraisal does not mean all stress is good. It does not mean burnout is a mindset problem. It does not mean organisations can expose people to unreasonable demands and teach them to think differently about it. It does not mean a growth mindset is all you need. It also does not mean that everything the Yerkes-Dodson model is used to support is accurate (ask me about that later).
What we should say
In pressure situations the useful reappraisal is not “this isn’t stressful,” which may be obviously and objectively false. It’s “this stress response can help me meet the demand.” It is closer to Gross’s own example of the move, which is that my racing heart is not a sign of anxiety, it means my body is preparing.
And I say that because the research is narrower than self-help, Insta, and even workshops I’ve had to sit through would have you believe. Arousal reappraisal interventions teach people that some of the physiological activation they feel under acute pressure is functional, part of a system preparing them to respond.
The data
Bosshard and Gomez meta-analysed the randomised trials in 2024. Across 35 studies and 5,638 people, teaching people to read their stress response as useful produced a small but significant improvement in task performance, d = 0.23. Translated, that means if we took one person who got the training and one who didn’t, both at random, the trained one performs better roughly 56 times out of 100. With no effect at all it would be 50. So the training moves the odds about six points. That’s the size of the intervention. It’s a very helpful nudge in the right direction, but it’s totally not a transformation.
One more number, for transparency. Studies that find an effect get published more readily than studies that find nothing, so the published literature runs hot. Correct for that and the 56 drops to about 54. Still there, still small.
What’s really useful though, is what’s inside the numbers. Underneath that average are 44 comparisons split three ways. Thirty-three tested arousal reappraisal on its own, the best evidenced of the three, and that arm lands at about 56 in 100 too. Six tested a stress-is-enhancing mindset on its own, and the range in the data ran from 46 (a bit worse than doing nothing) up to 64. That’s great, but with a range like that it’s essentially meaningless. The last five added further content on top of the message, an imagery exercise in one study and growth mindset content in another, and those did best of all, about 62 in 100.
That last bit is the one to hang your hat on. Interventions that added something on top of the message beat interventions that delivered only the message. Different things got added across those studies, so we don’t know which ingredient did the work, but what you can take to the bank is that just telling people a thing is the weaker option. We can at least tell you what those five actually added. Imagery exercises in two of them, growth mindset content in one, physical exercise in another. So teach the reappraisal, attach it to more than a talk, but don’t buy mindset training on its own.
Hint: If you’re buying programmes, and being sold a transformation, aka a miracle, there’s definitely over-claiming going on, and you’re being had… Save the money.
What this looks like in a room that’s already busy
Sometimes you can’t reduce the demand. In emergency management for example, the river is still rising. The shift still starts at six. What a controller can change is the resource side of that appraisal.
Structure, clear priorities, named next decisions and tolerance of uncertainty are all resource language. “This is difficult. We’ve handled difficult before. Here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t, here’s the next decision and who holds the pen on it.” That shifts appraisals without pretending the pressure away. The opposite also works, in the wrong direction. A leader who catastrophises, reorders priorities hourly and treats questions as challenges to authority has added a social demand on top of the operational one, and the same task is now more costly.
What regulation looks like in practice
Sticking with emergency management for illustration, but you’ll have your own examples:
- Name the response accurately. “My heart rate is up because the stakes are high and my body is preparing to act” is a different starting point from “I’m stressing out and losing it.”
- Shrink the immediate job. Not “I have to run this whole activation,” but “get the first situation report built and the next briefing started.” The next controllable action is a smaller thing to hold than the whole imagined event.
- Use breathing without mythology. Many people find slow breathing helps. You may find it useful. It’s a regulation tool, not a reset button.
- Anchor attention externally. What information do I need? What is the person on the radio actually saying? Rumination pulls attention inward, and the work usually needs some of it back outside. our skulls.
- Prefer “ready” to “calm.” People perform well with pounding hearts. The question is whether the arousal is being read and directed in a way that is useful for the task.
The boundary we shouldn’t cross
There’s a line between performance regulation and organisational gaslighting. If the roster is unsafe, the activation has run three weeks on goodwill, the duty phone never really gets turned off, or people are repeatedly exposed to trauma without recovery, “reappraise your stress” is not the intervention. Change the work. Individual regulation skills belong downstream of good system design, not in place of it. Arousal regulation may help someone execute during the event. It doesn’t excuse the organisation from reducing preventable pressure before it or providing recovery after it.
So retire “calm down” in most performance settings. Calm is pleasant. It’s also often unnecessary. You don’t always need to make the body quiet. Sometimes you need to give the activation a better job.
And if you’re unsure if the programme you want to buy is a lemon, ask me.
Photo by Yogendra Singh on Unsplash