Anxiety can be a crippling part of life, but Tracee Ellis Ross has found a way to make peace with it.
While appearing live on TODAY July 23, Ross opened up about the important life lesson her mother once taught her that has shaped the way she handles stress.
“I read a quote somewhere that your mom, Diana Ross, taught you anxiety and excitement are the same things,” Sheinelle Jones said.
“So that’s what my mom always used to say when I was younger. So, they are the same. They feel the same in your body. They just have a different label,” Tracee Ellis Ross explained.
Diana Ross and Tracee Ellis Ross at the 2019 Vanity Fair Oscar Party.George Pimentel / Getty Images
Over time, the actor has adapted the lesson a little bit. She still believes that anxiety and excitement are the same thing, but she also likes to underscore the fact that “one doesn’t have breath.”
“So excitement, when you’re excited, you’re breathing, you’re so excited, and your body is filled with that feeling. When it’s fear, there’s not a lot of breath and you get scared, but it’s the same butterflies inside your body,” she said.
Ross went on to explain that anxiety is par for the course in her chosen career, especially now that she’s appearing on Broadway.
“It’s part of what I do. And so, it’s not that it goes away. I get nervous every night. Every night I say to the team, ‘Are you sure I can do this?’ And I just step into it anyway,” she said.
The 53-year-old said trust plays a big part in the process of surrendering to your anxiety.
“I trust that the work and the discipline and all that I worked to prepare is there underneath me, and that my feet will know where to go. And I have the story to tell and I will be able to kind of deliver and be of service to the material,” she said.
Knowing the meaning behind her work also helps Ross control her anxiety.
“When you’re doing something like this, my job is not to be there to be about me. My job is to tell the story and be of service to the audience and be of service to the story, so that I’m delivering for the audience to understand. It’s not about me. And so that also takes the nervousness away,” she said.
Ross, whose show “Solo Traveling with Tracee Ellis Ross” just returned for a second season, has often spoken about the lessons she’s learned from her Motown icon mom.
“I come from a lot of abundance, but all of the abundance that I enjoy is mine, that I’ve built, and building my own life has made me very aware of what my mother built on her own and what it took for her to do that,” Tracee Ellis Ross told Self in July 2025.
“The example she set for me (was) that I didn’t need a man to build the life I wanted,” she added. “It wasn’t, ‘Look at me,’ it was, ‘This is me.’ And that informed something very important for me foundationally.”