The Power of Anxiety

Most people can remember times in their lives when anxiety helped them learn.

“When Hurricane Floyd swept through North Carolina in September 1999, I was working in Wake Forest for Sprint as a senior HR manager,” said Ray Feagins, vice president of human resources, talent and organizational development at King Pharmaceuticals. “There was extensive flooding, and about 100 of our employees lost everything they owned. The company asked my team to serve as an employee emergency disaster center — an abrupt shift from a traditional HR function.

“First, we had to find out if all our people were still alive, which was not easy with phone lines down and cell towers not working. Then we coordinated with FEMA to arrange housing for our employees, get them some cash to tide them over until the banks reopened, and secure food and clothing for their families. I was doing things I’d never done before. The stakes were obviously very high. It was an anxious time, but I learned more about planning, organizing and communicating in those few weeks than I did from all the leadership courses I ever took.”

Not only can life’s anxieties help us learn; life often reveals anxiety’s upside. Bob Rosen, founder, chairman and CEO of global management consulting and research firm Healthy Companies International, wrote the book Just Enough Anxiety to counter the perception that anxiety is always bad and to help business leaders use anxiety as a success driver. There are many ways “just enough anxiety” can be used to powerful effect by chief learning officers, learning designers and facilitators of learning experiences.

Ancient Impulses

Anxiety arises from the old brain, sometimes called the limbic system or emotional brain. This part of the brain responds to threats and environmental changes. Fear and its close cousin anxiety have been guardians of human survival since the beginning of time. Just as they kept prehistoric man from being some animal’s dinner, fear and anxiety keep modern-day humans from walking down dark alleys at night.

Unchecked, however, anxiety can be debilitating. Fortunately, the newer part of the brain, often called the executive brain, gives humans the capacity to consciously choose their responses to anxiety. Humans can treat anxiety as a resource rather than an enemy by remembering that, in the right measure, anxiety fuels higher levels of performance. Armed with this crucial insight, organizations can engineer anxiety into a profoundly productive force.