About this video

• Video Title: Stop fighting your anxiety and start using it | Jesse Eisenberg for Big Think+
• Channel: Big Think
• Speakers: Jesse Eisenberg
• Duration: 10:37

Overview

Jesse Eisenberg discusses his personal experience with performance anxiety, particularly stage fright. He shares how he learned to reframe his anxious feelings not as something to fight, but as a potential motivator or a sign of caring deeply about his work. He offers insights from his own experiences as an actor and director, as well as advice he's received and given to others in similar professions.

Key takeaways

• Performance Anxiety is Common: Eisenberg describes experiencing significant performance anxiety, even after numerous successful performances, attributing it to catastrophic thinking where the mind anticipates failure after a string of successes.
• The Power of External Perspective: He highlights how colleagues and directors have helped him by normalizing his anxiety, reassuring him that his feelings are understood and even common within demanding professions.
• Reframing Panic: Eisenberg suggests that instead of fighting panic attacks or anxious feelings, one can learn to accept them and even use them as a source of motivation, seeing them as a sign of genuine investment in the task.
• Normalizing Difficulties: He emphasizes that professions, whether acting, directing, or journalism, have inherent difficulties and anxieties, and that acknowledging and understanding these is more productive than trying to ignore them.
• Empathy and Shared Experience: Eisenberg finds solace and motivation in recognizing that others, even highly successful individuals, experience similar fears and self-doubt, and that giving advice can, in turn, help oneself process these emotions.