Coffee Before an Audition: Should You Avoid It?
- Gökçe Kutsal
- Apr 26
- 5 min read
Updated: 15 hours ago
* Where I describe clients in my blog posts, I've changed names, instruments, and other identifying details to protect their privacy. Sometimes I'm describing one person, sometimes a pattern I've seen across several. The essence of the experience and what we worked on together remain true.
Should I stop drinking coffee before an audition?
The question 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.
The phrasing varies (Should I have less? Switch to tea? Cut it out completely?), but it's almost always wrapped in the same logic:
Caffeine raises my heart rate, I already feel activated, so removing the coffee should make things better, right?
Most of the time, the answer is no :)
And I get it, the concern makes sense on the surface. 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 not to ignite in the first place. So the logic follows... remove the coffee, remove the problem.
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 very day his body would be under the most stress, he was thinking about quitting.
What happened was... less predictable than 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. 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's come to expect it. Removing it is already a big adjustment. On a normal day, you might notice that as a mild headache, or fatigue, or just feeling slightly out of sync...
But on an audition day, that same change can feel like something is very wrong.
Which Kind of Musician Are You?
Coffee doesn't affect all musicians the same way, and the variable that matters most isn't your caffeine tolerance. It's how anxiety actually shows up in your body.
Some musicians experience pre-performance anxiety as activation: Racing heart, shaky hands, tight breathing, a buzzing or jittery feeling, fingers that feel slightly out of your control. If this is you, your nervous system is already running hot. Adding caffeine to that is pouring fuel on a fire that's already burning. For activated musicians, coffee before a high-stakes performance tends to make things measurably worse.
Other musicians experience anxiety as shutdown: Fog, tiredness, dissociation, that strange flat detachment where your fingers know what to do but you can't quite feel them doing it. The metronome of your own thinking goes quiet. The room feels far away. If this is you, your nervous system is collapsing rather than spiking. For shutdown-pattern musicians, caffeine can actually be helpful... it pulls you back into the room, sharpens your attention, gets you present enough to play.
Most musicians are predominantly one or the other, though some shift between the two depending on the stakes and the day. The first step is figuring out which pattern is yours, ideally by noticing it across several performances rather than just one.
The musicians who get the most use out of coffee before high-stakes performances are usually the second group. The musicians who think they're "sensitive to caffeine" are often the first.
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.
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 and 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 about your physical limits. If you want to make a change, 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
Let me just say this first: 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.
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 here isn't about the caffeine itself. It's about how your body responds under pressure.
This is what I help musicians with in private coaching. Understanding 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 music performance coach for professional orchestra musicians and opera singers, with an MA in Voice Pedagogy, plus coaching and teaching experience since 2017. I work with orchestral musicians, soloists, 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.
