My Personal Experience of Performance Anxiety

2009-04-25T00:23:00.000-07:00

This is perhaps not the most logical "first" post for a blog on recorder playing, but as I performed yesterday and another one tonight, it is the clearest thing on my mind and I have several ideas that I wanted to put out there.

Existential Performance Anxiety

My anxiety starts basically as soon as I know I will be performing. As I write this I am already mildly anxious about my very informal performance tonight, about my lesson next week, about the mock audition later this semester, about a performance that will not occur until next semester and even about the performances I know I will need to do 2 years from now.

I don't think that this mild anxiety at the beginning is a bad thing, for me. It has an overall positive effect: I care about performing well and I do my best to make sure that I will do well. The stress here is a motivating factor, not a debilitating one. At a physiological level, stress that involves learning and memory helps the brain develop new neural connections within itself, so this is as much a good thing for my overall well-being as well as for the short time I will be performing.

Pre-Performance Anxiety

As the time for the performance approaches, my anxiety gradually increases until I get to the class or event where I will be performing, when the stress suddenly becomes more problematic. My heart starts beating faster, my hands start shaking, and my stomach proceeds to tie itself into a knot until it is "finally" my turn. Throughout this time I have generally tried to "breathe deeply" (this may actually make things worse, but I'll get to that) in the hopes that this will calm me down and decrease my heart rate to something closer to normal.

I think I am at least successful in pretending that I am calm. I am frequently told that, despite my confessions of anxiety, I look calm, I look like I've got everything under control, etc.. This is probably a good thing -- I'm sure that my audience would prefer to see a confident performer rather than someone who looks a nervous wreck -- though I wonder, and I will get to this again later, if this has some other, negative, repercussions.

(During-) Performance Anxiety

Once I get on stage (or equivalent), it suddenly becomes much harder to hold myself together (deep breathing is generally continued but clearly does not work!). Throughout the early stages of anxiety I am generally pretty introverted, inhabiting my own head for the most part, which may be a reasonably good coping mechanism because it isolates me from anything happening in the environment that might add to my stress. Actually getting up in front of people forces me out of my head -- at the very least out of necessity (I now need to pay a lot of attention to what I am hearing and what my body is doing) but perhaps also due to the amount of stress I feel.

Getting out of my head leads to 2 observations: first of all, everything looks different, sounds different, feels different. This is easily attributed to the effect of the sympathetic nervous system in giving one temporarily keener senses: of course my perception is going to be different. This first observation also leads me to a judgement: my perception has been altered, therefore I cannot trust myself to respond appropriately because my perceptions in other areas I have not considered may have also been altered, and the kinds of thoughts, techniques and assessments I have available in my memory might not be appropriate for my new senses. This leads to me feeling kind of lost, and the diminished self-trust obviously leads to a diminished self-esteem at a time when I really need to be feeling confident.

The second observation is related to the first, and the physiological reasons for the first: everything is so much more intense. Especially: everything sounds really loud and harsh to my ears. This is not only devastating to my confidence because something that I usually take pride in (my tone quality) is totally gone -- I sound like I am playing a recorder made of 30-grit sandpaper if you can imagine that! -- but it puts me right on the edge of overstimulation. I normally have very sensitive hearing even without any stress (I'm glad that the recorder is a relatively quiet instrument!), but everything becomes very much too loud, almost too loud to even hear what pitch it is (after a certain volume, or at least perceived volume which is often different, I start hearing everything as a blurry noise instead of music), and so often I end a performance hoping that I was in tune because I was too overwhelmed to make much of a guess at it and it sounded like sandpaper anyway. It also makes it generally hard to concentrate.

The keener senses can also lead to a keener sense of helplessness as I notice every waver in my breath that I can't manage to control, the uncontrollable shaking in my fingers that makes my fingers harder to control in turn, and every other thing that goes wrong because I can't manage to keep a lid on my anxiety. This is not exactly inspiring.

This also has another effect: because I'm somewhere between perceiving everything and being barely able to perceive things properly, I tend to play, and to move, much more conservatively on stage than I will at any other time. I've been advised by several teachers to "exaggerate" things, but I am a shy person by nature and already feel like what I am doing -- especially in regard to movement -- is over the top (this is never what the audience thinks).

Post-Performance Anxiety

I invariably feel much worse after a performance than I ever feel before or during the performance, although I suspect that the feelings are also much less rational. I feel like I have to fight to stay standing once I finish playing (yesterday I failed altogether at the standing thing -- I felt like I was going to fall over so I knelt on the ground straight away, and then couldn't get back up in a hurry), and I have to fight back tears. Years ago I would burst into tears after every performance -- my tear ducts are more compliant now but my eyes still get wet and I thought I was going to cry yesterday.

This is not entirely related to my feelings that my performances are rubbish, because I at least have the sense to know that I'm perceiving the events differently to the audience and also that I'm a terrible perfectionist, which tempers my disappointment to some extent. Much of it seems to be a directionless and baseless emotional outburst.

Questions Raised

Is my habit of deep breathing actually making things worse?

Hyperventilation causes panic attacks. It is quite possible (and in fact I think it is true) that I am getting too much oxygen. This may be preventing me from truly calming down, and, due to the effect of making me feel like I'm short of air, will likely be impairing my ability to control my breath (which is a bad thing for wind instruments).

My teacher has also said things to this effect. Yesterday, when I was clearly suffering after my performance, he told me to "Breath out, breath out, breath out, and don't breath in until it happens by itself". In future I'll try to make more use of this, and perhaps this will improve both my anxiety and my playing.

Is my pre-performance introversion making the during-performance sensory exposure more overwhelming than it needs to be?

I don't have any good answers for this one. I guess there is a chance that going from suddenly mostly ignoring the sensory environment to paying a lot of attention to it may at least be a shock to the system, however I suspect that if I was to be less introverted in the lead-up I may get overstimulated earlier or even before I start playing, and get more anxious overall. I guess I should experiment, but I feel like I've found an ok coping mechanism and I don't really want to risk feeling more stressed than I have to be.

Does "looking calm" and trying to "keep a lid" on my anxiety simply "postpone" some of the feelings of anxiety, to be let out in a bizarre emotional outburst at the end of the experience, rather than really helping me to stay calm?

Again, no answers, but an interesting question. Even if I am simply postponing the reaction to the stress, is this really a bad thing? (Obviously I should manage to get off stage first, but otherwise, is it possible that this is also a valid coping strategy?)

I'm going to try to put the breathing strategy in practice tonight -- I'll let you know how I go.

Welcome

2009-04-25T00:15:00.000-07:00

This blog is not intended to act as an authority on recorder playing, although I intend it to contain a lot of useful information that will be relevant to recorder players, other musicians, composers, educators, and even audiences.

I am only a student of the recorder, and I still have much to learn. This blog is about learning, first and foremost. You'll read about what I have learned, what I am currently learning, what I hope to learn. I'll also share my personal experiences, so other people can learn from them.

You'll also come across quite a bit of speculation and supposition in this blog. I'll try to make it clear when they appear. The idea behind including it is that you can probably learn at least as much from my thought processes and my mistakes as you can from the facts themselves.

Whoever you are, I hope you can take something away from this blog and add to your own learning experiences.

Blog Index (Always Updated)

2009-04-25T00:00:00.000-07:00

Read This First

Welcome to "On Playing the Recorder"

Performance Anxiety

My Personal Experience of Performance Anxiety