What to Do When You Start Overthinking During a Performance

Aug 6

6 min read

Updated: Oct 22

Title text on black background: What to Do When You Start Overthinking During a Performance, with pastel speech bubbles.

* 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.

Almost every musician I work with has a version of this story, and it nearly always starts with something small.

A note that doesn't land the way you expected. A phrase that feels slightly off. Something just noticeable enough that your attention catches on it...

That note was bad. Oh no.

And then it builds... fast. Everything starts to feel off, you begin checking things you weren't thinking about a minute ago, and your attention moves away from the music and onto yourself.

What are they hearing? Did they notice? That sounded bad. Now this bit is going wrong too.

Of course, it doesn't stop there. It goes further.

They definitely noticed. They're probably making fun of me already. I'm going to look ridiculous. Even if they say something nice afterward, they're obviously just being kind, they can't possibly mean it.

By this point you're not really playing anymore, you're reacting. Trying to fix it, trying to get control back, trying to stop whatever just happened from spreading into the next phrase.

And the harder you work at it, the less stable the whole thing feels.

This Is the Moment Everything Speeds Up

What's happening is that your attention has moved. Instead of being with the music, it's split three ways:

Monitoring what you're doing, predicting what might go wrong next, and imagining how all of it is landing out in the room.

That's a lot to juggle while also trying to perform a piece of music in the best possible way.

And it happens fast, which is why it feels less like a gradual slide and more like something you suddenly lost.

Why Trying to Fix It Makes It Worse

Our first instinct sounds reasonable, right?

Focus harder, control things more precisely, grip a little tighter...

It's a reasonable instinct, but it adds another layer of pressure. Because now you're playing and managing the performance at the same time, while it's happening, and that isn't something anyone does cleanly. The usual result is more tension, more monitoring, and less contact with the music.

This has been studied for decades, mostly in sport, and it even has a name. Richard Masters called it reinvestment: Under pressure, you take a skill that had become automatic and hand it back to conscious, step-by-step control, as though you were learning it for the first time. He and his colleagues built a scale to measure how prone a person is to doing this, and found that the people who score highest are the ones most likely to come apart when the stakes rise.

(It’s the same mechanism behind falling apart in an audition final after strong earlier rounds, which I’ve written about in Why You Choke in the Final Round.)

Nothing has happened to the skill itself, it's still there. What's changed is that it's being supervised by a slower part of the brain.

Where Your Attention Goes Changes What Comes Out

But wait, we have more research (wheee!!):

Adina Mornell and Gabriele Wulf tested this directly with musicians in 2019. They took skilled players, asked them to perform a prepared piece of their own choosing in front of an evaluating audience, and varied one thing: Where they were told to put their attention.

One group focused on the precision of their finger movements, or lip movements for the singers, and on getting the notes right. Another focused on playing for the audience and on the expressive sound of the music.

Expert raters then scored every performance for musical expression and for technical precision. The musicians attending outward, to the sound and the room, scored higher for expression (which you might have predicted). But surprisingly enough, they also scored higher for technical precision. Watching your own fingers closely made the fingers worse.

(My own MA research with professional singers found a similar thing, by the way.)

This is worth keeping in my for the moment your attention turns inward. You're not only losing the music and the enjoyment of it, although you are losing both... the accuracy you turned inward to protect is the very thing that suffers for it.

What to Do When You Start Overthinking Mid-Performance

The usual advice is to relax, breathe, calm down... which is lovely in theory and pretty useless once you're already in it, because you can't force your way back to calm in the middle of a performance. (Anyone who has tried knows how that goes.)

What you can do though, is smaller than that. You bring your attention back to one specific thing, something immediate enough to actually hold it.

It can be the next phrase, the next entry, the shape of the line you're in right now... or my favorite, the story you want to tell through this music.

My point is, you don't have to solve the whole performance while you're in the middle of it. You just need somewhere for your attention to land that isn't the spiral.

You Don't Need to Stop the Thoughts

The thoughts might carry on: That was bad. This is going wrong. They're judging me.

This is completely normal by the way, we're not trying to get rid of them. This means you also don't have to argue with them or prove them wrong (which can turn into its own full-time job).

You just don't have to follow them. They can run in the background while your attention goes somewhere else entirely.

What Happens If You Don't Interrupt It

If we let the mind run its usual patterns, unfortunately the spiral doesn't end when you walk off stage. It just changes form.

First it's: That was awful. Everyone noticed. The people who said nice things afterward don't really mean it, they're just being polite.

Then it's two in the morning and you're not sleeping, and the version running now is: I've humiliated myself. I can't imagine going back there. I can't imagine looking those people in the eye. Maybe I shouldn't even be calling myself a musician. Clearly I don't have what it takes. Maybe I should have chosen a different job entirely.

Notice how it has stopped being about a single moment in a performance. It's about what that moment has been taken to mean: About you, about your ability, about whether you belong in this at all.

One wobbly note has turned into a crisis about your entire career.

In my experience, this is what gets people to stop auditioning, to turn down things they'd have said yes to a year ago, to withdraw by degrees from the thing they love most...

And very often it started with one note, and what the mind did with it afterward.

Coming Back to the Music

Now I'd like to make something clear:

A performance with nothing at all pulling at your attention isn't a realistic target. It simply can't be. The mind is a thought generating machine, and it's going to keep generating thoughts. It's its job.

What you're aiming for is to notice when your attention has been pulled away and bring it back to something you can work with, even when it's untidy and the thoughts are still running a debate show in the background.

Because the moment your attention gets back to the music, even partially, your mind and body begin to settle. And from there you can keep going.

One thing worth mentioning is that this is a skill. It's much easier to use if you've already decided what you're coming back to, because the middle of a spiral is a terrible moment to start inventing a plan. Most musicians I work with have never picked that thing deliberately, so when their attention goes, there's nowhere particular for it to land.

It's also a skill you can practice regularly in your practice room. You don't have to wait for the next high-stakes performance to find out whether it holds.

That's what Performing Under Pressure is for. It's the program for musicians who already have the technique and are tired of losing it to their own attention: Where it goes when the pressure arrives, what's worth putting it on instead, and how to practice that before you're standing in front of anyone.

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.

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