Name: How to rewire your anxiety into authenticity | Jesse Eisenberg for Big Think+
Uploaded: 2025-10-08T18:07:20.000Z
Duration: 10 min 37 s
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And I forgot the other thing that I was supposed to say because I was, sorry, I'm gonna get better by this.

In the next answer, what is the thing that was supposed to be like?

I have, you know, what you might call stage fright.

I think my therapist calls it something a little more medical.

Every other year or so, I would write a play and perform a play that I had written, and

I would perform the show, you know, 150 times.

That's, you know, when you do a run of a play, you know, that's how many performances you do.

Which might sound just, you know, crazy to an outsider that you do that same play 150 times, but

as the performer in it, every One of those 150 times feels so different.

And so I would notice that as the play went on, the run of the play went on, when we would get to performance 100 out of, let's say, 150, it would just get worse and worse and worse.

Now, it's totally counterintuitive because you would assume that if you'd done 100 performances and they've all gone well, why would the 101st go bad?

But the way my mind works, which is just out of anxiety and catastrophization, is that I assume that because the 101st first performances went well, the 101st is definitely not going to go well.

That, you know, you can't land on red 100 times without hitting black.

So I would be most anxious by the 150th performance that I cannot believe.

We've done 149 shows and they've all gone so well.

Tonight's the night where I'm not only going to screw it up, but

I'm going to turn to the audience to say the most embarrassing thing that I would never even tell my best friend.

I think a lot of people can relate to that in other industries because, you know, we all have this feeling that, you know, if something's going right, you know, if you're a person who worries, the next thing's going to go wrong.

And it's so strange because when I'm having these kind of, like, anxiety, kind of panic attacks before the performances, my colleagues, who have been like, uniformly amazing colleagues, especially dealing with somebody who.

Who is, like, kind of emotional like I am, you know, they're kind of, like laughing at me, which is nice, because it shows that, you know, what I'm feeling is not to be fretted over.

And then oftentimes I'll ask them the same question that I asked them the night before.

Do you think it's going to go well tonight?

I remember my one friend, Michael Zegan, the actor, is this great actor.

We would be backstage every night, and he would just be so sweetly.

And I said, but you think tonight's gonna go well, too?

He's like, yeah, yeah, I told you that two nights ago, too.

And so I'm kind of surrounded by sweet people, you know, in my industry, I'm sure, like a lot of industries, but

in particular, you know, kind of the arts.

It attracts oftentimes empathetic people.

And so it's good for my, you know, personality to be around that, or maybe it enables my personality to get worse.

But if somebody were to come to me and said, you know, I'm panicking.

I know the 150th is going to be the worst one, you know, of course I would say, how could you possibly think that?

You have to look at those 149 as evidence, foolproof evidence, that the 150th is going to be exactly the same.

For something bad to go wrong, it would have to be such an unbelievable fluke because it would have gone wrong before, and

it probably would have gone wrong in the beginning, those first 10 performances.

And so it's funny, I am able to both see outside myself and see that kind of what is worrying or rankling me is probably not healthy or totally rational.

But when it feels that way, it's hard to not believe it because, you know, feelings are oftentimes so much more powerful than rational thoughts can be.

I've been on movie sets before where I had what I would call, like, legitimate panic attacks, like where your body kind of, you know, sometimes it races and you, you know, kind of feeling like your breath is, you know, racing and your heart's racing and you feel like you're hyperventilating.

But I've also had these other kind of weird panic attacks where your body just kind of shuts down.

And in Scenes where I was supposed to be, you know, kind of open, I felt closed.

And that was like its own kind of very scary panic attack.

And I was doing a movie called Adventureland where I had a scene.

I was, like, saying goodbye to my parents because I was moving to New York City.

I have a paycheck waiting for me, and my body just shut down.

And I went over to the director and I just said, I'm so sorry.

And it was this very sweet, wonderful director, Greg Mottola, who every actor who works with him wants to work with him again.

And he took me aside, he said, oh, take a break, everybody, for five minutes.

He took me aside and he said, I just want to let you know that not only do I understand what you're experiencing right now, but

I'd be so surprised if you didn't experience it all the time.

That's kind of emotional, that is demanding, and yet you're also worrying if your hair looks, like.

And so, like, I couldn't understand how anybody would do the job you do.

And I just had this, like, you know, incredibly cathartic experience hearing that advice.

And I went back and did the scene, and it was great.

The scene was, you know, great because I.

The kind of weight off my shoulders was removed because the expectations I had for myself of being like you, you know, perfect in every moment were just taken away.

I just said, oh, yeah, this job that I do does have difficult aspects to it, and

I shouldn't try to kind of, let's say, ignore those things.

I should try to just understand that they're there.

They're probably always going to be there and let me just try to embrace them.

And, you know, that applies to any profession because, you know, all professions have unusual quirks, unusual difficulties that, you know, you probably think are pretty difficult to explain to somebody not in that field.

But what I found is what I felt that day on that set was very normal, very common.

You know, my cousin is a sports journalist, and

he, you know, he panics the day before a deadline, writing about football.

Again, it's something that I think is totally unrelated to my, you know, experience as an actor in a movie.

And yet we commiserate about that same fear.

I do find that when I'm around people who kind of have similar emotional experiences that I do, which is to say kind of self doubt, panic about future things, catastrophizing, otherwise benign experiences.

I love being in the position of giving advice, of helping somebody, of calming them down, because it feels wonderful to help somebody.

And then for the selfish reason of you seeing that actually their fears are oftentimes your fear, you know, giving that advice can also, you know, help you be able to receive it the next time.

When I was on the set of my own movie as a director, I was not acting in my first movie.

And he's just the loveliest, most talented young man.

And so you think, wow, this kid must be so comfortable, must be so cool.

And yet, like everybody I meet who's very good at their thing, he was panicked the whole time.