Performance Anxiety in Musicians: Causes & Real Solutions
- Gökçe Kutsal
- Dec 6, 2025
- 20 min read
Your hands are shaking. Your heart hammers so hard you're convinced the first row can hear it. You've practiced this piece for months... perfected every phrase, memorized every dynamic.
But standing in the wings, your mind goes blank. The stage manager calls your name. You walk out, sit down, and somehow get through it. Afterwards, you know you played below your capability. Again.
It's the dreaded performance anxiety musicians get before and during big performances.
If you're reading this, you've probably experienced some version of this scene. Perhaps multiple times. Perhaps it's gotten worse over the years rather than better. And if you're a professional musician (someone with a titled position, an established career, years of training), you might be wondering why success hasn't made this easier.
It should have, shouldn't it? More experience, more performances, more evidence of your competence...
Except performance anxiety doesn't follow that logic.
In my work with hundreds of professional musicians, I've noticed an unexpected paradox:
The higher the stakes, the worse the anxiety often becomes. Success amplifies it rather than diminishing it.
This post covers what music performance anxiety actually is (beyond simple 'nervousness' or generalized anxiety), why musicians are particularly vulnerable to it, the three interconnected layers it operates on, what doesn't work (and why you keep being told to try it anyway), and what actually does work, i.e. evidence-based approaches that address the root causes rather than just suppressing symptoms.
Table of Contents:
What Performance Anxiety in Musicians Actually Is (Beyond "Nervousness")
Performance anxiety isn't the same as pre-performance nerves. Everyone experiences some level of arousal before performing — increased alertness, heightened focus, a quickened pulse...
That's normal. That's your body preparing you to do something that matters.
Performance anxiety is what happens when that arousal becomes overwhelming enough to interfere with your ability to perform. It's the point where heightened alertness tips into catastrophic thinking. Where increased heart rate becomes palpitations. Where focus narrows so much you lose peripheral awareness entirely.
The Difference Between Nerves and Performance Anxiety
Nerves feel like energy. They sharpen your attention and give you an edge. You can channel them into your performance. Adrenaline becomes fuel.
Problematic performance anxiety feels like drowning. Your technique degrades. Your bow shakes so badly you can't execute a passage you've played perfectly hundreds of times in the practice room. Your breath control collapses. Your fingers feel like they belong to someone else. Adrenaline becomes interference.
The distinction matters because the two require different responses.
Nerves are something you work with. Performance anxiety is something you need to regulate, reframe, and gradually recondition.
It's Not Just Mental
Here's what makes performance anxiety particularly cruel:
It operates on multiple levels simultaneously.
It's not just "all in your head," though your thoughts certainly play a role. It's also in your body — your racing heart, your trembling hands, your constricted throat. And it's in your emotions — the dread, the shame, the helplessness....
Your body's threat-detection system is activated. Your autonomic nervous system can't distinguish between genuine danger and evaluative scrutiny. Both trigger the same ancient survival response: Fight, flight, or freeze.
Research on performance anxiety in musicians suggests that anywhere from 15% to 60% of professional musicians experience debilitating performance anxiety at some point in their careers.1
The variation in those numbers reflects differences in how anxiety is measured and defined, but the takeaway is clear:
This is common. Extraordinarily common. Even among elite professionals.
If you're struggling with this, you're not uniquely flawed. You're human, and your nervous system is doing exactly what it evolved to do — protect you from perceived threat.
Possibly a bit misguided in these modern times, but it's doing it's job.
Why Musicians Get Performance Anxiety (The Neuroscience + Psychology)
Simply put, the problem is that your nervous system can't tell the difference between an audition panel and a sabre-toothed tiger.
That sounds glib, I know, but it's physiologically accurate.
Here's what happens in your body during a performance:
The Threat-Detection System
Your autonomic nervous system operates on a simple binary: Safe or unsafe.
When it detects threat — real or imagined — it activates your sympathetic nervous system. This is the fight-flight-freeze response. Your amygdala (the brain's threat-detection centre) bypasses your prefrontal cortex (rational thought) and triggers a cascade of physiological changes designed to help you survive.
What follows is that familiar tale:
Heart rate increases. Blood flow is redirected from your digestive system and fine motor control areas to your large muscle groups. Stress hormones — cortisol and adrenaline — flood your system. Your pupils dilate. Your breathing becomes shallow and rapid. All of this happens in milliseconds, before conscious thought even registers what's occurring.
To your brainstem, walking on stage at the Barbican looks identical to walking into a predator's den.
Both involve:
High stakes (survival vs. career)
Scrutiny (predator's gaze vs. audience/panel)
No escape route (can't run from either)
Potential for catastrophic failure (death vs. humiliation)
The system is working exactly as designed. It's just designed for the wrong scenario.2
Why Musicians Are Particularly Vulnerable
You might be wondering why some musicians are more prone to getting nervous than others. That's because several factors make musicians especially prone to performance anxiety:
Public evaluation in real-time. Your competence is on display as it's happening. Unlike a writer who can revize privately or a visual artist whose work is viewed in their absence, you're performing live. Mistakes are immediate and visible.
Physical exposure. You can't hide behind a script or notes. String players can't disguise a bow shake. Brass players can't mask a breathing issue. Singers can't conceal vocal tension. The instrument reveals everything.
Fine motor control under pressure. Performance anxiety disrupts precisely what you need most. Muscle tension is the enemy of good technique. For string players, a relaxed bow arm is essential — tension produces shake. For brass players, breath control is fundamental — shallow breathing destroys endurance. For singers, an open throat is crucial — constriction kills resonance. Anxiety creates the exact physical conditions that sabotage performance.
Perfectionism culture. Conservatory training often reinforces impossibly high standards. Mistakes are treated as failures rather than part of the learning process. This creates a psychological landscape where anything less than flawless feels catastrophic.
Career stakes. Auditions for titled positions, principal roles, elite orchestras — these are high-pressure, high-consequence situations. One performance can determine your career trajectory. That's fertile ground for anxiety.
I worked with an opera singer in her fifties, well-established in a major European opera house. She came to me because despite decades of performing, despite a successful career, despite countless performances under her belt it hadn't gotten easier. If anything, it had gotten worse. She was seriously considering leaving the profession because performance anxiety had become unbearable. The expectation that experience should have resolved this (and the shame of it not having done so) was almost as difficult as the anxiety itself.
Unfortunately, this is the paradox I see repeatedly:
Success doesn't eliminate performance anxiety. Often, it intensifies it.
Higher positions mean more exposure, more scrutiny, more at stake. The pressure compounds.
Plus, social comparison at elite levels is brutal. Everyone around you is extraordinarily talented. It's easy to fixate on what others do better and dismiss your own strengths.
Perfectionism combined with comparison creates a psychological environment where performance anxiety thrives.
The 3 Layers of Performance Anxiety (Physical, Cognitive, Emotional)
Performance anxiety operates on three interconnected layers. They don't exist in isolation — they feed each other, creating reinforcing loops that can feel impossible to escape. Understanding each layer is essential because you can't address performance anxiety by targeting only one dimension. The most effective approaches work across all three simultaneously.
Layer 1: The Physical Response
When your nervous system perceives threat, it activates your sympathetic nervous system — the fight-flight-freeze response. This produces a cascade of physical symptoms:
Shaking hands or trembling bow
Rapid, pounding heartbeat
Shallow, rapid breathing or breathlessness
Dry mouth
Sweating (often cold sweats)
Nausea or stomach distress
Muscle tension (particularly in shoulders, neck, jaw)
Dizziness or light-headedness
There is nothing random about these. They're perfectly reasonable, adaptive responses designed to help you survive physical danger. Your body is preparing to run or fight. Blood flow is redirected away from your digestive system (you don't need to digest food whilst fleeing a predator) and fine motor control areas toward your large muscle groups. Stress hormones sharpen focus but narrow attention. Your pupils dilate to take in more visual information.
The problem, of course, is that you don't need to run or fight. You need to stand still and execute intricate fine motor tasks with precision and control. Your body is optimized for survival, not performance.
The cruel irony is that the physical symptoms of anxiety are particularly destructive to the very skills required for performance.
Tension is the enemy of good technique. A string player needs a relaxed bow arm... tension produces shake. A brass player needs controlled breathing... rapid shallow breaths destroy endurance and tone. A singer needs an open throat... constriction kills resonance and range.
I worked with a principal flautist who'd developed severe shakiness in exposed solos and soft low passages. Her technique was impeccable in the practice room. But on stage, particularly during soft dynamics where even the slightest tremor was audible, her hands and breath would shake visibly. The more she tried to control it (by gripping harder, tensing more), the worse it became. This is the feedback loop where anxiety creates tension, tension creates shake, shake creates more anxiety.
Layer 2: The Cognitive Response
Performance anxiety produces characteristic thought patterns:
Catastrophising: "I'm going to fail," "This will be a disaster," "My career is over"
Negative self-evaluation: "I'm not good enough," "Everyone else is better," "I don't belong here"
Mind-reading: "They think I'm terrible," "The panel is judging me," "Everyone noticed that mistake"
Memory interference: "What comes next?" "I've never seen this music before in my life"
Attentional narrowing: Hyperfocus on errors, inability to recover from mistakes
These thoughts aren't simply 'irrational'. That's an important distinction. They're not illogical or unfounded — they're your mind attempting to protect you by anticipating and preparing for threat.
The problem isn't the thoughts themselves. The problem is believing them uncritically and allowing them to dictate your behaviour.
Thoughts are information. They're signposts, not necessarily the truth.
When the thought "I'm going to fail" appears, it's not predicting the future — it's signalling that your nervous system has detected threat. That's useful information. It tells you something about your current state (dysregulated, under-resourced, perceiving high stakes).
But it doesn't tell you anything reliable about your actual capability or the likely outcome of your performance.
In Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT), this is called cognitive fusion: When you become so entangled with your thoughts that you treat them as literal truth rather than mental events.
The alternative is defusion: Noticing thoughts without engaging with them, recognising them as transient mental activity rather than facts requiring response. Like clouds passing over the sky on a sunny day.
Layer 3: The Emotional Response
Beneath the physical symptoms and cognitive patterns sits the emotional layer:
Fear (of failure, humiliation, judgment)
Shame (about having anxiety, about not being "good enough")
Dread (anticipatory anxiety about future performances)
Frustration (at your inability to perform as well as you can in practice)
Helplessness (feeling trapped in the anxiety with no way out)
Often, musicians experience meta-anxiety: Being anxious about being anxious.
You think you should be over this by now. You believe that professionals don't struggle with nerves (they do). You interpret anxiety as evidence of weakness or inadequacy rather than a normal human response to perceived threat.
The shame about the anxiety becomes more debilitating than the anxiety itself.
Musicians tell themselves they're unprofessional, that they're letting people down, that they should just "toughen up"...
This self-judgment reinforces the cycle.
How the Layers Interact
These three layers don't operate independently, they form reinforcing feedback loops:
A thought appears ("I'm going to mess up the exposed passage").
This triggers physiological arousal (heart rate increases, breathing shallows).
The physical sensation generates emotion (fear).
The emotion reinforces the thought ("See? I'm already falling apart").
The strengthened thought intensifies the physical response (more tension, visible shaking).
Performance begins to degrade.
This confirms the original thought, deepening the emotional response, further dysregulating the nervous system.
The cycle continues, often spiralling until the performance ends or the musician dissociates (disconnects from present-moment awareness as a protective mechanism).
Breaking this cycle at any single layer can help.
You don't need to address all three simultaneously — intervening at just one point can disrupt the entire pattern.
This is why effective approaches to performance anxiety work across multiple dimensions rather than targeting only thoughts, only physiology, or only emotions.
What Doesn't Work for Performance Anxiety (And Why You Keep Being Told to Try It)
If one more person tells you to "just relax" or "imagine the audience naked", you might actually scream. (I know, me too!)
Well, on the bright side, those don't work for anyone.
Less bright side: You've probably already tried most of the commonly recommended strategies and found them insufficient.
And that's not because you're doing them wrong.
It's because they're incomplete solutions to a complex problem.
"Just Calm Down" / "Just Relax"
You can't think your way out of a nervous system response.
When your sympathetic nervous system is activated, ie. when you're in fight-flight-freeze, your prefrontal cortex (responsible for rational thought and executive control) has reduced influence. The amygdala has already triggered the physiological cascade. Telling yourself to relax doesn't override that process.
In fact, trying to force yourself to calm down often creates more tension.
It's a paradoxical effect: The effort to suppress anxiety generates additional arousal. You're now anxious about being anxious, and you're expending cognitive resources trying to control something your conscious mind doesn't directly control.
It's like telling someone who's drowning to "just swim". Technically accurate, entirely unhelpful in the moment.
Breathing Exercises
Breathing techniques are genuinely useful. Controlled breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system (the rest-and-digest response) and can help down-regulate arousal. We'll return to specific techniques in the next section.
The limitation is that breathing exercises alone don't address the cognitive and emotional layers of performance anxiety.
If you do box breathing whilst still believing "I'm going to fail" and feeling overwhelming dread, a catastrophizing mind will override any attempts to regulate your body. The physical arousal may reduce, but the thought patterns and emotional responses remain intact.
Breathing is a valuable tool. It's not a complete solution.
Positive Thinking / Affirmations
The problem with affirmations like "I am calm and confident" is that they create cognitive dissonance when your body is in fight-or-flight.
Your mind knows you're not calm. Your hands are shaking. Your heart is racing. Repeating "I am calm" doesn't convince your amygdala — it just highlights the gap between what you're saying and what you're experiencing.
From an ACT perspective, you don't need to change your thoughts to positive ones. You need to change your relationship with your thoughts.
You don't need to believe "I'm confident" to perform well. You need to unhook from "I'm going to fail" so it doesn't control your behaviour.
Thoughts don't have to be positive to perform effectively. They just can't run the show.
"Exposure Therapy" Without Support
Exposure does work (we have ample evidence in research studies) — gradually facing feared situations can recondition your nervous system's threat response.
The problem is that unstructured, sink-or-swim exposure can re-traumatize rather than desensitize.
If you throw yourself into high-stakes performances whilst completely dysregulated, you're not building confidence... you're basically reinforcing the association between
performance and threat.
Your nervous system logs another data point: "Performance = danger"
And next time, it responds even more intensely.
Effective exposure is graduated, supported, and paired with regulation skills.
You start small (low stakes, high safety) and progressively increase difficulty as your capacity to regulate improves.
Flooding yourself with high-anxiety situations before you have the tools to manage them is like learning to swim by being thrown into the deep end.
Some people survive. Most just develop a terror of water.
And we don't do that here.
Beta Blockers
Beta blockers suppress the physical symptoms of anxiety: They block adrenaline receptors, reducing heart rate, tremors, and sweating.
For some musicians, they're a useful short-term tool for managing acute physical symptoms during high-stakes performances.
The limitation is that beta blockers don't address the underlying anxiety.
You still feel terrified — you just can't feel your body's signals.
For many people, this is deeply unsettling. The disconnect between internal experience (fear, dread) and external presentation (steady hands, calm pulse) can feel disorienting.
Plus, beta blockers are not a long-term solution. They don't teach your nervous system that performance is safe. They don't address catastrophic thinking or emotional distress. They suppress symptoms without resolving causes.3
Now, imagine if you took a beta blocker for auditions or important solos regularly... and suddenly got a new role with 8 shows a week, or a tour with daily performances. It simply wouldn't be sustainable to take them every day.
To be clear, I'm not anti-beta blockers — they have a place in performance anxiety management for some musicians in specific contexts. I specificaly tell my clients to keep taking them until they build the skills to experiment without them.
But they're not a standalone fix, and they don't build the regulation skills or cognitive flexibility that create lasting change.
Why These Keep Being Recommended
Most of these strategies are based on kernels of truth...
Breathing does help. Exposure does work. Reframing thoughts is valuable.
The problem is that they're often presented as simple, universal fixes when performance anxiety is neither simple nor universal in its presentation.
Different musicians experience performance anxiety differently.
What works brilliantly for one person may be ineffective or even counterproductive for another.
The approaches that actually work are those that address the root mechanisms (nervous system dysregulation, cognitive fusion, disconnection from values) rather than just suppressing surface symptoms.
What Actually Works: Real Solutions for Performance Anxiety in Musicians
Here's the part where I'm supposed to give you the "one weird trick" that solves everything. I won't, because it doesn't exist :)
What does exist: Evidence-based approaches that address the underlying mechanisms of performance anxiety across all three layers — physical, cognitive, emotional.
Keep in mind, these aren't quick fixes. They're skills that develop over time with practice. But they work. They create lasting change rather than temporary symptom suppression.
Nervous System Regulation (The Foundation)
This is where effective performance anxiety work begins: Teaching your nervous system that performance is not a life-threatening situation.
You can't do meaningful cognitive work from a dysregulated state — your prefrontal cortex is offline when your amygdala has hijacked your system.
Nervous system regulation isn't about "calming down".
It's about expanding your window of tolerance — the range of arousal you can experience whilst still maintaining access to your executive functioning and technical skills.
So the goal isn't to eliminate anxiety, that would be impossible.
It's to widen the bandwidth within which you can perform effectively even whilst experiencing arousal.
Specific techniques:
Physiological sigh: A double inhale through the nose (one deep breath followed immediately by a second shorter inhale to maximally inflate the lungs) followed by an extended exhale through the mouth. This pattern directly activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Research by Andrew Huberman and colleagues at Stanford demonstrates its effectiveness in rapidly reducing arousal.4
Grounding exercises: The 5-4-3-2-1 technique anchors you in present-moment sensory awareness. Identify 5 things you can see, 4 you can touch, 3 you can hear, 2 you can smell, 1 you can taste. This interrupts rumination and reconnects you with immediate sensory reality rather than catastrophic future projections.
Resourcing: Deliberately recalling moments of safety, competence, or calm. This isn't forced positive thinking — it's activating neural networks associated with regulation. Before a performance, briefly recall a time you felt capable and grounded (a successful performance, a moment of flow in the practice room, even an entirely non-musical memory). This primes your nervous system with regulatory capacity.
Pendulation: Intentionally moving attention between activation and calm. Notice areas of tension in your body, then shift attention to areas of relative ease. This teaches your nervous system that it can modulate arousal—that you're not stuck in hyperactivation.
This is the foundation of The Confident Musician™ Method — we start with body and nervous system regulation before attempting cognitive work. I've worked with musicians who spent years trying to "think differently" with minimal success. Once they learned to regulate their nervous system first, the cognitive work became possible.
Which brings us to....
Cognitive Defusion (Unhooking from Thoughts)
Traditional CBT approaches to performance anxiety often involve challenging thoughts: "Is that thought true? What's the evidence? What's a more balanced thought?"
This can be helpful for some people in some contexts. But it has limitations.
The ACT approach is different.
Instead of debating with your thoughts (which often just entangles you further), you practice noticing thoughts without engaging with them.
You recognize them as 'mental events' — temporary, not necessarily accurate, and certainly not commands requiring obedience.
When the thought "I'm going to fail" appears, instead of arguing with it ("No I'm not, I've practiced, I know this piece") or gathering evidence against it, you simply notice: "There's the 'I'm going to fail' thought again. Thanks for showing up, Mind."
This isn't suppression. You're not trying to push the thought away. You're acknowledging its presence without treating it as truth or allowing it to dictate your behaviour. The thought can be there, and you can still walk on stage and perform.
Thoughts as information: So here's a useful reframe. When catastrophic thoughts appear repeatedly in certain contexts, they're often signposts rather than predictions.
If "I'm going to fail" consistently shows up when you're tired, underprepared, or overstimulated, that's information. It's telling you something about your current state or your needs — not about the objective likelihood of failure.
Instead of asking "Is this thought true?" ask "What is this thought trying to tell me? When does it typically appear? What does it signal about what I need right now?"
Arousal Reappraisal (Anxiety → Excitement)
Research by Alison Wood Brooks at Harvard Business School tested this with public speakers. Participants were divided into groups and instructed to say different things to themselves before speaking. One group said "I am anxious". Another said "I am calm". A third said "I am excited".
The excited group performed significantly better than both other groups.
Why? Because anxiety and excitement are physiologically identical. Both are high-arousal states. Your heart races, your hands sweat, your stomach flips... The sensations are the same. The only difference is your interpretation — threat or opportunity.5
When you try to "calm down", you're fighting against your body's arousal. You're in a high-energy state attempting to force yourself into a low-energy state. That creates internal conflict, and usually fails.
When you reframe arousal as excitement, you're working with your physiology rather than against it. You're not trying to change the sensations — you're changing what they mean. "My heart is racing because I'm excited to perform" feels different than "My heart is racing because I'm terrified".
In my experience, musicians who can reframe their arousal as excitement consistently perform better. Their heart rates are the same. The physical arousal is identical. But they're not adding a layer of resistance and self-judgment on top of the nerves.
Graduated Exposure with Support
Remember how I said earlier, 'exposure works'?
Well, repeatedly facing feared situations whilst nothing catastrophic happens gradually retrains your nervous system's threat response. The amygdala learns: "Performance happened. I survived. Perhaps this isn't as dangerous as I thought".
The critical piece is that exposure must be graduated and supported. You start with low-stakes situations — contexts where you have regulation skills available and the consequences of "failure" are minimal. You slowly increase difficulty as your capacity to regulate improves.
I worked with a bass guitarist who experienced severe performance anxiety: Shaking hands, thumping heart, complete inability to read music or count bars, feeling like "I've never seen this music before in my life" even with pieces he'd played for years. He couldn't perform in his band anymore.
So we started with the lowest possible stakes: He recorded himself playing a single phrase alone in his practice space. Just that. Then playing for his partner at home. Then a friend who wasn't a musician. Slowly building: small informal gatherings, open mic nights with minimal audience, rehearsals with his band (low pressure, mistakes expected), finally actual performances.
The progression took months. But by building gradually — always with nervous system regulation skills in place, always within his expanding window of tolerance — he eventually returned to performing in band settings feeling capable and even enjoying it.
This is the opposite of sink-or-swim exposure. It's systematically expanding capacity whilst maintaining a foundation of safety.
Values-Based Motivation (Why You Perform)
This is the Vision component of The Confident Musician™ Method, and it's often overlooked in performance anxiety work. But it's crucial.
Why do you perform?
Not "to avoid judgment" or "to prove I'm good enough" or "to win"... Those are avoidance-based motivations — you're moving away from something rather than toward something.
What are your deeper values? Connection? Expression? Beauty? Challenge? Growth? Sharing something meaningful with an audience? Contributing to a musical tradition?
When you're connected to your values, anxiety becomes more tolerable. You're not performing to avoid catastrophe — you're performing because it matters, because it's aligned with what you care about. The anxiety is still there, but it's not running the show.
ACT research (including my own MA project) demonstrates that values-based action increases psychological flexibility — the ability to experience difficult thoughts and emotions whilst still behaving in accordance with what matters to you.6
You don't need to feel confident to perform. You need to be willing to feel anxious in service of something you value.
This distinction transforms the relationship with anxiety. It's no longer an obstacle to be eliminated before you can perform. It's something that might be present whilst you do something meaningful.
Your First Steps to Relief: 3 Actions You Can Take Today
You don't need to overhaul your entire approach tomorrow. Sustainable change happens incrementally. Start with these three concrete steps.
Step 1: Practice Nervous System Regulation Daily
Choose one regulation technique — physiological sigh or 5-4-3-2-1 grounding. Practice it daily in low-stakes contexts when you're not anxious.
And this is crucial: You can't learn regulation skills in the middle of a panic response. Your brain needs to build the neural pathways when you're calm so they're accessible when you're dysregulated.
Try five minutes daily. In your practice room before you start playing. Whilst walking. While sitting with morning coffee. Boring, mundane contexts with zero pressure.
Once the technique becomes automatic in low-stakes settings, begin using it in the practice room. Then in dress rehearsals. Eventually, bring it to performance contexts.
By the time you need it on stage, your body already knows what to do.
Step 2: Notice Your Thoughts Without Engaging
Start observing when catastrophic thoughts appear.
Don't argue with them. Don't challenge them with evidence. Don't try to replace them with positive thoughts. Just notice.
"Oh, there's the 'I'm not good enough' thought."
"There's the 'everyone's judging me' thought."
"There's the 'I'm going to mess up' thought."
Name them without getting hooked. This is cognitive defusion practice. It's a skill, and it develops with repetition.
Practice this in your practice room first. Notice the thoughts that arise during difficult passages or when you make mistakes. Get familiar with your thought patterns in low-pressure contexts before attempting it in performance.
Step 3: Identify Your Performance Values
Take 15 minutes to write responses to these questions:
Why do I perform? (Not "to win" or "to avoid failure" — what actually matters to me about sharing music?)
What do I want my performing life to be about?
What would I want to be true about how I show up as a musician, even if I can't control outcomes?
Your answers might include things like expressing emotion, connecting with audiences, honouring the composer's intentions, challenging myself, contributing beauty, being part of a musical tradition, experiencing flow...
Write these down. Return to them before performances. Let them orient your attention toward what matters rather than toward threat avoidance.
These three steps won't eliminate performance anxiety overnight. But they start building the foundation for a different relationship with it — one where anxiety can be present without controlling your behaviour or destroying your performance.
You're Not Alone in This
Performance anxiety is extraordinarily common among professional musicians.
Research suggests that between 15% and 60% of professional musicians experience debilitating performance anxiety at some point in their careers.1 Even principals with decades of experience struggle with this. Success doesn't make it disappear — often it amplifies it as the stakes increase.
That's a relief! Because then, if you experience performance anxiety, it doesn't mean you're not talented. It doesn't mean you're not dedicated or professional. It doesn't mean you "should be over this by now".
It means you're human, and your self-protection systems are responding to perceived threat in exactly the way it evolved to respond.
This is manageable. Not something you cure and forget about, but something you learn to work with. And the work is teaching your mind and body that performance, whilst significant, isn't life-threatening.
If you’ve ever walked off stage feeling defeated, knowing you performed below your capability, I want you to know you’re not alone. I’ve supported hundreds of musicians through this exact experience, from principals and opera singers to players preparing for elite auditions.
If you’re seeing yourself in this, 1:1 work can help you understand why these patterns show up and how to change them. Together, we map your nervous system responses, the cognitive loops that intensify under pressure, and the internal expectations that make performing feel so high-stakes.
From there, we build a grounded, personalized plan for your real performance situations —recordings, run-throughs, auditions, and daily practice — using research-based tools applied to your actual musical life.
If you’re wanting steadier performances, fewer spirals, and a clearer path forward, you’re welcome to book a tea date here. We can talk through what’s happening for you and explore what support might help.
This work takes time. But you don’t have to do it alone.
References
Kenny, D. T. (2011). The Psychology of Music Performance Anxiety. Oxford University Press.
LeDoux, J. (2015). Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety. Viking.
For detailed discussion of beta blockers in performance contexts, see Gates, G. A., Saegert, J., Wilson, N., Johnson, L., Shepherd, A., & Hearne, E. M. (1985). Effect of beta blockade on singing performance. Annals of Otology, Rhinology & Laryngology, 94(6), 570-574.
Balban, M. Y., et al. (2023). Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal. Cell Reports Medicine, 4(1).
Brooks, A. W. (2014). Get excited: Reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(3), 1144-1158.
Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2011). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
