Even After Therapy and Hypnosis: Singing Still Filled Her with Anxiety
- Gökçe Kutsal
- Apr 19, 2025
- 7 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
* This story is shared with care. To respect the client’s privacy, some details have been changed. The essence of their experience and the outcomes remain true.
She'd been a working professional singer for over a decade — pop, R&B, funk, disco, Motown — performing up to 80 gigs a year. With a background in acting on top of the singing, she was the kind of performer who could hold a room. From the outside, she looked entirely at home on stage.
What people didn't notice was that she had been quietly struggling with performance anxiety, for a time. And this is what brought her to me, as she had already tried things that people usually do. Positive affirmations, Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy, hypnotherapy and all that.
But these things hadn't really worked for her.
She came to me because she had tried things that should have helped, but nothing seemed to make a difference. And she was starting to think that maybe nothing would help her.
What Was Actually Going On
She had a lot of experience, and she was also really good at what she did. But sometimes she felt like she was not really herself when she was on stage.
Some days she would get very nervous and her body would react in ways. Her throat would get tight, her hands would get sweaty, and her heart would beat really fast. On other days, it was even weirder than that. She would sing a song she had sung times before but it would feel like someone else was singing, not her. It was a strange feeling, like she was outside of her own body.
The voice in her head that criticized her was always talking when she was performing live. Even when things were going okay, she still felt like something was off.
What she wanted was to feel like she was the one using her voice. She wanted to feel like she was really there, connected to herself. She wanted to be free to express herself of just trying to get through the next part of the song.
What Hadn’t Worked (And Why)
She'd tried hypnotherapy, which gave her short-term relief.
She'd done CBT, which helped her stay present rather than ruminate on the past or worry about the future. Both did something. Neither did enough.
I want to say a brief word about why, because I see this pattern often.
CBT typically asks you to challenge anxious thoughts: To find the evidence against them, to reason your way to a more accurate appraisal. That can be genuinely useful for some kinds of anxiety. But performance anxiety isn't really a logic problem. It's a fight-flight-freeze response that happens before you even think about it. This response gets to your body before any thought forms in your head. By the time you are trying to think about the counter-thought, your heart is already beating faster, your breathing has already quickened. And you are trying to use the thinking part of your brain to argue with the fight-flight-freeze response. But the fight-flight-freeze response is very old and it reacts very fast... it is not something you can think about, it just happens.
Hypnosis can be calming, but it tends to live in the recording — useful before a gig, but harder to apply in the moment when you're already on stage, the band has started and the weight of watching eyes makes you go blank on a song you've sang a thousand times.
Neither approach gave her what she actually needed: Tools she could use on the spot, with her eyes open, mid-performance.
A Different Kind of Session
When we began our work together, I was struck by how intelligent and resourceful she was, and how much she clearly loved music — even though her relationship to it had become complicated.
As a singer and voice teacher myself, I sometimes offer singer clients the option to sing during our sessions if they feel comfortable. It's something I find useful as we can test tools and techniques in real time, in real context, rather than only talking about them in theory. Anxiety is best worked with where it actually lives, which is in the body, on the doing.
When she sang during one of our early sessions, I could see her eyes glaze over. Her attention was clearly pulled inward, and every tiny imperfection sparked a visible wave of self-judgement... almost as if all she could think about was how I must've been secretly judging her.
It was painful to watch, because her voice was beautiful and her acting background made her genuinely expressive when she let herself be. The freedom was clearly available to her. She just couldn't access it when she felt observed.
The Turning Point
A lot of the work focused on what she was paying attention to.
Instead of trying to "get it right" (which is an internal target that has no clear edge and is therefore impossible to hit), we anchored each performance in a different question:
“What do I want to express through this song?”
Simple, I know. Almost too simple. But it changes everything. Getting it right puts the audience's imagined judgement in the centre of your attention. What do I want to express puts the song there instead. And the voice follows the attention.
Her acting background turned out to be a real gift here. She already knew how to find an intention in a piece of material, she just hadn't been doing it with her own singing because she'd been too busy monitoring herself to remember she could.
We worked alongside this with mindfulness, but adapted. She'd already discovered that traditional eyes-closed practices didn't translate to the stage (which is, you know, an eyes-very-much-open environment). So we built open-eyed, performance-friendly versions: Ways of orienting attention to the room, to the band, to the song, that worked while she was actually singing rather than only between songs.
A Real-World Test
One of the more memorable moments of our work came not from a triumphant performance but from a horrible one.
Mid-gig, a possibly intoxicated audience member told her, out loud, to her face:
“We don’t need you here. The guitarist sings well enough.”
(I know... the audacity of some people is genuinely something.)
Earlier in her career, that comment would have derailed the rest of the set. Probably the rest of the week. This time, she felt the sting fully — she didn't pretend it hadn't landed — and then she made a choice about where to put her attention. She refocused on her intention and managed to finish the set with conviction.
What She Said
By the end of our work together, she described the change in her own words:
“I’ve been able to get through the majority of my gigs without any worries. If I do feel anxious, I recover quicker. I’m not concentrating on the bad parts anymore. It’s a predominantly positive outlook, and I’m not as anxious going into gigs either. That’s a really good thing for me.”
This was her subjective experience. But because she was a participant in my final MA project on coaching for music performance anxiety, we'd also been tracking the work in measurable ways, and I believe that's worth showing too.
What The Numbers Showed
We used two validated measures, plus an external panel of music educators scoring her performances before and after coaching.
Kenny Music Performance Anxiety Inventory (KMPAI). Here, scores above 105 indicate problematic levels of music performance anxiety.
Pre-coaching: 152
After six sessions: 83
Three months later, with no further sessions: 59
That's a 61% drop from where she started. The part I find most interesting isn't that she ended up below the clinical threshold — it's that the score kept dropping after coaching ended. The work had become part of how she practised, performed, and lived. Tools that work when no one is supervising you are the only kind that matter long-term.
Experiential Shame Scale (ESS). This measures shame around having anxiety in the first place — the meta-layer of "what's wrong with me that I'm still struggling with this". Deep down, often louder than the anxiety itself. Her score dropped from 5.6 to 2.4. That shift, in many ways, was the one that mattered most. You can't perform freely while you're ashamed of how you feel doing it.
Adjudication panel. Eight experienced music educators scored her singing on six dimensions, before and after coaching, blind to which was which:
For the detail oriented ones, here are average scores for each category out of 10:
Before coaching | After coaching | |
Pitch | 6.88 | 7.75 |
Timing | 7.75 | 8.25 |
Control | 6.88 | 8.13 |
Musicality & Expression | 7.13 | 8.25 |
Character & Conviction | 5.50 | 7.75 |
Confidence & Presence | 6.00 | 7.88 |
Every category improved. The biggest jumps were in Confidence & Presence, Control, and Character & Conviction — which I'd argue are precisely the dimensions you'd expect to improve when someone's attention is no longer hostage to their inner critic.
One juror even wrote:
“For this wonderful singer — great improvement on storytelling and stage presence. My score would have been 10 if the energy and presence were kept more in the rests and interludes. But I was really pleased to see such an improvement with the feeling during the singing.”
I love that this juror provided the kind of feedback you can actually use. And it tells me what I most wanted to know: The emotional connection was coming through to people who didn't know her, who had no investment in her story, and who were paying attention.
What She Wrote
Gökçe helped me step out of my comfort zone and improve as a performer. She explains everything clearly, really listened to my needs and wants as a singer, and my performance nerves depleted as the weeks went on. I wish the programme didn't have to end as it has changed me for the better.
She continues to work as a professional singer and actor. The anxiety isn't gone — I don't think it's meant to be, and I'd be slightly suspicious of any work that promised it would be. What's gone is the version of her relationship with anxiety that made every gig feel like a referendum on her right to be there at all.
She knows what to do now when nerves arrive. And she knows that the part of her that loves singing is bigger than the part that's afraid of being heard.
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.
