Can Swearing Help With Audition Anxiety? (Yes, Really!)
- Gökçe Kutsal
- Jun 7
- 5 min read
Updated: Jun 16
* 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.
As you might've gathered from the title, this post contains actual swearing — not just asterisks. You might want to keep little eyes and ears away :)
...
We good? Okay, here we go:
One of my clients has a small ritual he does before every gig:
He sits in his car in the venue parking lot, takes a full breath and says out loud, with feeling: Fuck it.
The way you might say it when you've been overthinking something for a week and you've finally decided to just do the thing. He says it once, sometimes twice...
Then he gets out of the car, walks into the venue, and by his own account shows up lighter and more fully present than he does on the days he doesn't do it.
He's not the only one. A surprising number of the musicians I work with have some version of this — a private swear, muttered into a mirror or a travel pillow or the steering wheel, before walking out for something high-stakes.
Though they tend to mention it slightly sheepishly, as though it's a guilty habit... I'd argue it isn't.
Because the research is actually on their side.
What the science actually says
Richard Stephens at Keele University has spent over a decade studying the effects of swearing on physical performance and pain tolerance.
The headline findings are consistent and (slightly) surprising: Swearing aloud increases pain tolerance (you can hold your hand in ice water longer if you're swearing while you do it), and it increases power output on physical tasks like grip strength and short cycling sprints.
The effect isn't huge, but it's real and reliable enough that you can replicate it in a controlled lab setting. It seems to work via what Stephens calls emotional self-arousal — saying a real swear word, with feeling, briefly fires up your sympathetic nervous system. Your heart rate climbs slightly. Your stress response gets cleaner and more directed.
And for a short window, you can do more than you could thirty seconds ago.
A few important caveats from the research: The words you use have to actually be swear words for you :) Made-up substitutes don't work. Polite alternatives don't work. The word has to carry real emotional charge or the effect doesn't show up.
And, interestingly, habitual swearers get a smaller effect than people who don't swear much in daily life, because the words have lost their charge through overuse.
So if you're the kind of musician who already swears constantly, the pre-gig swear might need to be a particularly forceful one to land properly.
Why it works for musicians specifically
The pain-tolerance research is the part that gets cited most often, but I think the more interesting mechanism for musicians is something the studies don't quite measure directly.
When you're standing backstage before an audition, the version of stress you're usually in is flight: Shrunken, watchful, trying to be small, hoping the room won't notice you too much.
And sometimes it tips over into freeze: That strange flat detachment where your body and brain can't quite connect and you feel like you're not quite there.
Notice how both of those states are about being acted-upon, being one-down. Something out there is going to happen to you, and you're trying to brace for it.
Saying fuck it, out loud with intent, does something physiologically that the research has measured. But it also does something psychologically that I think matters more.
It moves you from being acted on to acting. You're not waiting for the audition to happen to you anymore. You're choosing to walk into the room. The threat doesn't shrink, but your relationship to it does. You're not one-down to it. You've decided.
That shift from flight toward something more like engaged readiness (what some polyvagal-informed practitioners would call a move from sympathetic shutdown toward ventral engagement, but with a controlled flash of mobilising energy first) is exactly the state you actually want for an engaged performance.
The swear is just the doorway. I believe what's happening underneath is a small reclamation of agency:
I get to make my own choices and decide my own fate.
How to actually do it
A few practical notes if you want to try this:
Do it alone, somewhere private. Your car, the bathroom, the corridor before anyone else arrives. Not in the green room. Not where the panel can hear you. The point isn't to perform the swear for anyone (and accidentally create an unintended reputation for yourself), it's to do it for yourself.
Mean it. A muttered, half-hearted swear under your breath does almost nothing. The word needs to carry actual force. If you can feel a tiny adrenaline kick when you say it, you're doing it right.
Use a word that's still loaded for you. If you're a constant swearer, reach for something stronger or rarer. If you almost never swear, an ordinary fuck will probably do the job. Shit, bollocks, or your own native-language favourite all work too... what matters is the intention.
Once, maybe twice. Not a tirade. This is a state-shifting tool, not a venting session. Saying it once with real intent works better than saying it twenty times in frustration.
Pair it with the choice it represents. The reason it works isn't just the word... it's the small internal declaration underneath. I'm doing this. I'm going in. I'm choosing it. The swear marks the moment of decision.
What it's not
Well, it's obviously not a good substitute for being prepared. It's not a fix for unprocessed performance anxiety that has roots in something deeper. It's not a coping strategy for the kind of chronic anxiety that follows you around between gigs.
For those, you'd need actual coaching, actual rest, and sometimes actual therapy.
But for the specific moment of standing backstage with a churning stomach, wishing you were anywhere else? Yes. A well-placed fuck it can genuinely help.
Some of the most composed musicians I know swear like sailors in the five minutes before they go on. Then they walk out, bow, and play beautifully. It's a method.
If pre-performance anxiety is something you'd want to look at more seriously, my piece on performance anxiety in musicians goes deeper.
And if you'd like one-to-one support with the mental side of performing, that's what I do in private coaching.
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.
Research cited
Stephens, R., & Robertson, O. (2020). Swearing as a response to pain: Assessing hypoalgesic effects of novel "swear" words. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 723.
Stephens, R., Spierer, D. K., & Katehis, E. (2018). Effect of swearing on strength and power performance. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 35, 111–117.
Stephens, R., Atkins, J., & Kingston, A. (2009). Swearing as a response to pain. NeuroReport, 20(12), 1056–1060.
