RESPIRO E MOVIMENTO®

DISCOVER YOUR REAL POTENTIAL

PERFORMANCE ANXIETY

4 Ways To Stopy Worrying About An Upcoming Performance

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1. Engage in mood-enhancing activities.

Worry loops can strike us when we’re in a negative mood. Which doesn’t mean that we should aim to be radiating gleeful joyousness 24/7. But there is a paradoxical tendency, when we’re down, to do things that actually deepen our negative mood.

2. Use the “feel like continuing” stop rule

This is going to sound ridiculously simple, but when you find yourself in a worry loop, take a moment to pause and ask yourself if you’d like to continue worrying or not.

3. Cognitive defusion

Stepping back a bit to observe our inner voice, and to recognize that these are just thoughts – not reality – can help us move on more quickly and avoid getting trapped in a loop.

4. Parking your worries

This strategy will sound a little backwards too, but scheduling dedicated worry time is a classic psychologist worry hack.

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Research Suggests That You Can Learn to Perform Well Even When You’re Nervous

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Dutch basketball

One study involved two comparable Dutch national-level basketball teams.

Both teams started off with a baseline test of their free throw shooting abilities, with 20 free throw attempts under regular practice conditions (i.e. no pressure).

Then, they repeated the test – but with some pressure thrown in. To induce some anxiety, each team was split into two sub-teams, which competed against each other for a prize of €25. Their shooting performance was also videotaped, and they were told that experts would be reviewing the footage to evaluate their shooting technique. They were asked to imagine that each pair of free throws were the decisive points in a close game. And the coach and other players watched each shooter throughout the test.

During the next five weeks, over nine practice sessions, both teams took an additional 96 practice shots (which worked out to basically a few extra free throws after warmups, and again at the end of practice).

The only difference between the two teams, is that one of them (the anxiety-practice group), practiced their free throws under the same anxiety-producing conditions as their baseline test. While the other team (the regular-practice group), practiced their free throws in normal practice-like settings.

Then, the athletes retook the shooting test – 20 shots without any pressure. And then another 20 shots with the competition, videotaping, and other anxiety-producing elements added back in.

Does practicing with anxiety help?

During their baseline test, both teams performed worse when anxious. The regular practice team regressed from 75.4 points to 70.2 points1, and the anxiety practice team went from 77.1 points to 72.7 points.

After five weeks of training, however, things changed. The regular practice team again performed more poorly under pressure (73.1 with no anxiety; 67.9 with anxiety). But the team which practiced free throws under anxiety-provoking conditions not only didn’t regress under pressure; they performed even better. Specifically, 71.3 points with no anxiety, compared to 78.0 points with anxiety.

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The Importance Of Practicing Tricky Passages In Rhythm

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Piano player

Noa Kageyama, Ph.D., performance psychologist and musician teacher, shares his take on rhythmicity and performance.

Like every other instrumentalist, I had to take piano lessons in grad school. I had a very thoughtful student-teacher who observed that I had a tendency to play at a tempo which matched the most well-learned sections of the piece. So when I was playing parts that were comfortable for me and felt secure, I sounded great (not “great” in the literal sense, but you know, passable, for a non-pianist who practiced maybe 10 minutes the night before the lesson). But when I got to the sections which were less secure, I’d often fumble around in a panic or even flat-out stop while I organized my fingers for the next phrase. And even if I got the general rhythm of the music ok, played the notes mostly at the right time, and kept things going, the rhythmicity of my movements was off.

He acknowledged that it’s fun to hear ourselves playing the good parts in tempo, but encouraged me to put my ego on hold, and play at a more sustainable tempo, based not on the best-learned sections, but on the weakest passages. So that when I played through the piece, I would be able to comfortably play the most difficult parts without feeling quite so rushed and frantic when I got there.

To be clear, this is not about practicing with a metronome per se. Because you can still play in time, but with herky-jerky shifts that have poor rhythmicity. The idea, is that if faced with a difficult shift (as an example), it’s probably not enough to just practice the movements involved in the shift, and functionally getting from note A to note B. If we really want to maximize consistency and accuracy, we may have to practice the rhythmicity of the shift as well. So that whether we are practicing slowly, at tempo, or even above tempo, the rhythm of the shift is itself a target of our practice efforts.

Photograph by Hugo Enrique Garcia Ximenez.

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Do We Really Sound As Bad As We Sometimes Think We Do?

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musician rehearsal

Research suggests that the performers were able to evaluate the quality of their performances more accurately when they did so based on a video of their performance. When relying on only their memory of the performance, their evaluations were less accurate.

Why the difference?

Well, the major difference between dress rehearsal and concert performances, of course, is the amount of anxiety we experience. Might it be that our nerves make a difference in how we perceive the quality of our playing?

How to self-evaluate?

So if you want to avoid triggering the downward spiral of negativity and doomsday thinking, don’t try to evaluate how well you are playing in the middle of a performance. Save it for later – there will be plenty of time for beating yourself up afterwards, if you’re so inclined.

Photograph by Matthew Parrish Bassist.

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How To Unwire The Demons Of Stage Fright

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fright stage

Miranda Wilson talks about stage fright and shares two pieces of research on how to deal with performance anxiety.

In my career as a cellist and a professor of cello, I’ve noticed something happening again and again. A performance–my own or someone else’s–is going reasonably well, and then an unexpected mistake changes everything. It might be a wrong note, a badly missed shift, a momentary memory lapse.

In the split second after the mistake, things can go two ways.

  1. There’s a possibility that you recover, and the rest of the concert goes without incident.
  2. But the greater possibility, especially with inexperienced players, is that you withdraw into yourself. Your stance hunches or stiffens as you berate yourself over and over for your mistake. The concert goes on in the present, but you’re stuck in the past, obsessing about what went wrong.

→In her follow-up book, Presence, Cuddy shows us that when you adopt a powerful stance, such as standing with your feet planted apart and your hands on your hips, actual chemical changes occur in your body that improve your performance.

Before concerts, I stopped practising up until the last second, and instead just stood backstage with my hands on my hips, feeling the natural power of my stance surge through my body. My breathing seemed to deepen. My self-sabotaging tension–always the worst symptom of my anxiety–seemed, if not completely gone, at least lessened.

→At around the same time, I read a peer-reviewed study on the subject of performance anxiety by Alison Wood Brooks of the Harvard Business School. In this game-changing experiment, Brooks asked groups of students to perform a number of tasks that most people find anxiety-provoking: to sing in front of an audience, to compose and deliver a speech, and to take a math test. One group of students were told to try to be calm. Another group had no specific instructions for how to feel. Another were told to reappraise their anxiety as excitement. Woods evaluated her groups in a number of ways, from measuring their heart rates to rating their performances. The result in every case was that the “calm” group didn’t do much differently than the control group. The “excited” group, however, fared significantly better. This information changes everything for us performers.

Every time I had a little slip in that concert, instead of my usual self-berating response, I redirected my focus to “I’m excited. Excited that these people showed up to hear me play music I love.”

Mistakes, after all, are in the past. We can do nothing about them now. There’s no do-over, no rewind button, no time machine. It happened, and the choice is yours: you can sit there in the past with your mistake, or you can reframe your feelings and stay in the present with the music.

Photograph by Phil Knights.

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