“If you're sweating and your heart rate is up, it's seen as a sign something is going wrong, that you're too nervous, off balance, flustered,” M.I.T. associate professor Jared Curhan tells the New York Times. “Whereas we're showing that something could be very right.”
The "very right" is this: As published in the journal Psychological Science, Curhan and his co-authors found that physical activity can make you better in negotiations, but only if you feel confident beforehand. If you're anxious, the activity will only make matters worse--which reveals something interesting about the way we relate to our phsyical and emotional states.
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