# Excitement and anxiety-two sides of the same coin?



## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

Thread title is pretty self explanatory. 

My theory, you care about something, but you speculate the outcome will be either good(excitement) or bad(anxiety) or somewhere in between(the broad category of "nervousness").


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

So the general idea, then, is that they are two different varieties of anticipation. I would say that there is a degree of asymmetry though - anxiety _tends_ (not always) to regard uncertainties, while excitement _tends_ to regard certainties. For example, we may be anxious about the various things that _could_ happen in an interaction with another person, but excited about the _definite_ prospect of going to Disneyland next week. It's less common to be anxious about a definite future occurrence (I think "dread" might fit that better!), or excited about a myriad of possible events that only _could_ happen at some point (that would just be optimism).

So, I think we've got an excitement/optimism, anxiety/dread diamond type affair.


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## Cnote11 (Jul 17, 2010)

Is that an allowance for those who get excited at undetermined prospects and those who get anxious about upcoming definite prospects?


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## Jeremy Marchant (Mar 11, 2010)

Excitement refers to current experiences, anxiety always to the (imagined) future. So they're not two sides of the same coin.

Fear is the obverse of excitement (maybe), positive anticipation that of anxiety (maybe).


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