Coffee Before an Audition: Should You Avoid It?
- Gökçe Kutsal
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Your hands feel slightly different...
Just enough that you notice. The bow doesn't quite land the way it usually does. Your fingers feel a fraction less precise. Your heart is a little faster than you expected.
And then the thought arrives. Maybe it was the coffee.
The question of whether to drink coffee before an audition shows up more often than you'd expect… usually a few days before, sometimes the morning of, occasionally in the car on the way there.
It's a small thought, but it lands at exactly the wrong time. You haven't even played a note in the audition yet, and you're already trying to work out what went wrong.
I've had musicians ask me about coffee before an audition more times than I can count:
Should I stop drinking it? Should I have less? Should I switch to tea?
The concern makes sense. Caffeine increases alertness. It raises your heart rate. If you're already on edge, it can feel like pouring fuel on something you're trying to keep contained.
So the logic follows. Remove the coffee, remove the problem, right?
Except it doesn't quite work like that.
What Actually Happens When You Cut Coffee on Audition Day
I worked with an English horn player auditioning for a principal position in a major European orchestra. He told me he'd been completely cutting out coffee on audition mornings. This was someone who drank three cups a day without thinking about it — and then, on the one day his system was already under the most pressure, he'd suddenly stop.
What happened was predictable… just not in the way he expected.
The nerves didn't go away. If anything, they felt worse. His body felt off. His focus was harder to access. There was a kind of low-level agitation sitting underneath everything.
Not because coffee was the problem. Because now his system was dealing with two things at once: an audition and caffeine withdrawal.
We tend to underestimate how much our bodies rely on consistency.
If you drink coffee every day, your system has adapted to that. It expects it. Remove it suddenly, and your baseline shifts. On a normal day, you might notice that as a mild headache, or fatigue, or just feeling slightly out of sync.
On an audition day, that same shift can feel like something is wrong.
Caffeine and Performance Anxiety: What's Actually Going On
This is usually the point where musicians start trying to control everything. What you eat. What you drink. When you warm up. How long you warm up. Every variable gets examined, adjusted, optimized.
It makes sense. You're about to walk into a room where very small details matter. Of course you want to get it right.
But this question about coffee is rarely just about coffee.
It's about trying to prevent a feeling.
If I can just keep my body calm, then I'll be able to play the way I know I can.
The difficulty is that the body you're trying to control is not malfunctioning. It's responding.
Caffeine and performance anxiety interact in a fairly predictable way: Coffee tends to amplify what's already there. If your system is relatively settled, it might just feel like focus. If your system is already activated, it can tip into something that feels like too much.
But it doesn't create that activation out of nowhere.
So the more useful question becomes less about whether you should drink coffee, and more about what state you're already in before you even reach for it.
What We Actually Did Instead
With that English horn player, we didn't remove caffeine. We made it consistent. Same amount, same timing, same everything he did on a normal practice morning.
And then we worked on the part that was actually creating the instability. How his attention moved under pressure. What happened in his body when the audition panel walked in. The thoughts that showed up right before he started playing.
Coffee stopped being the thing he was trying to manage.
This doesn't mean caffeine is irrelevant. If you know that a certain amount makes you feel jittery in a way that doesn't help, that's useful information. You can adjust that over time, in low-stakes situations, where you're not also dealing with the added layer of an audition.
But making sudden changes on the day, or even the week of, tends to create more problems than it solves.
Your system prefers familiarity. Especially under pressure.
So if you usually have coffee, have coffee. If you don't, don't suddenly start.
(And if you're not used to it, this is probably not the moment to experiment with something like Vietnamese coffee, which I'm told is essentially a triple espresso in disguise.)
The Real Work Isn't About Removing Variables
You're not doing anything wrong by trying to get this right.
Most musicians I work with are doing some version of this. Adjusting, tweaking, trying to find the combination that will finally make everything feel stable in the room.
But the stability you're looking for doesn't come from removing variables one by one.
It comes from understanding how your system responds under pressure, and building something that can hold that response when it shows up.
If you have an audition coming up and want a session focused specifically on it (without giving up your morning coffee), the Audition Strategy Session is built for exactly this.
So, Should You Avoid Coffee Before an Audition?
If you usually drink coffee, stopping on the day of an audition is unlikely to help. It often adds another layer of disruption on top of everything else your body is already navigating. Consistency tends to work better than last-minute adjustments. And the real question isn't about caffeine. It's about how your body responds under pressure.
This is the work I do with musicians in coaching. Looking at how your mind and body behave in performance settings, and developing ways to work with that, rather than trying to eliminate it.
About
I'm Gökçe Kutsal, a performance coach for professional orchestra musicians and opera singers, with an MA in Voice Pedagogy and over 2,100 hours of coaching and teaching experience. I work with principals, titled positions, and audition candidates across Europe, the UK, North America, and Australia — and I write about performance anxiety, audition preparation, and the craft of practice for musicians who already have the technique and are trying to work out why it doesn't always hold up under pressure.
