Psychologists Wendy Berry Mendes and Jeremy Jamieson, at the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of Rochester, respectively, have conducted a number of studies showing that people perform better when they decide to interpret their fast heartbeat and breathing as “a resource that aids performance.” As they say: “Arousal is semantically and psychologically fuzzy. Our responses depend in large part on how a situation and our body’s responses are construed.”
