Performance Anxiety: How to Overcome With Strategies That Work

The goal of overcoming performance anxiety often called “stage freight” isn’t to eliminate nervousness entirely but to manage it effectively. All individuals who perform as musicians, athletes and actors and public speakers encounter feelings of anxiety during their performances. Controlling the nerves instead of trying to eliminate them leads to performance-enhancement through productive expressions of your energy.

Performance anxiety can feel overwhelming, even impossible to overcome. Failure to overcome performance anxiety challenges through repeated attempts could create the belief that you cannot modify your situation. Such responses match subconscious processes since your subconscious creates realities from what it recognizes as accurate. The belief system remains subject to change for transformation.

Symptoms of Performance Anxiety

Performance anxiety triggers the body’s “fight-or-flight” response, leading to a variety of physical, emotional, and cognitive symptoms:

• Physical Symptoms: Rapid heartbeat, sweating, trembling, dry mouth, nausea, dizziness, and shortness of breath.
• Emotional Symptoms: Feelings of fear, dread, or panic before and during the performance.
• Cognitive Symptoms: Racing thoughts, difficulty concentrating, mental blocks, and negative self-talk.

Recognizing these symptoms is the first step in learning how to manage performance anxiety effectively.¹

Causes of Performance Anxiety

Understanding the root causes of performance anxiety can help you address it more effectively:²

• Fear of Judgment: Worrying about how others perceive you.
• High Expectations: Setting unrealistic goals or fearing failure.
• Lack of Experience: Limited practice or unfamiliarity with the performance setting.
• Past Negative Experiences: Previous failures can reinforce anxiety in similar situations.
• Perfectionism: The belief that anything less than perfect is unacceptable.

Performance Anxiety Treatments

1. Be Prepared: Practice with Purpose While practice alone won’t cure anxiety, it helps build familiarity and confidence. Focus on meaningful rehearsal, not just repetition.
2. Shift Focus from Yourself to the Experience Instead of worrying about how you appear, focus on the value you’re providing. Imagine the audience enjoying your performance and feel that positive energy.
3. Maintain a Healthy Lifestyle Limit caffeine and sugar before performances. Eat balanced meals with complex carbohydrates for steady energy. Regular exercise, sufficient sleep, and a healthy routine support mental resilience.
4. Visualize Success Picture yourself performing confidently. Visualization helps rewire your brain to expect positive outcomes, reducing fear.
5. Challenge Negative Thoughts Identify and reframe self-doubts. Replace “I might fail” with “I am prepared and capable.” This mental shift reduces anxiety triggers.
6. Practice Relaxation Techniques Incorporate controlled breathing, mindfulness, or light physical activity like walking or stretching to release tension. Daily practice strengthens your ability to stay calm under pressure.
7. Connect with Your Audience Engage with your audience through eye contact and smiles. Treat them as allies, not critics, to create a supportive environment.
8. Embrace Authenticity Be yourself rather than striving for perfection. Authentic performances resonate more and reduce the pressure to meet unrealistic standards.³
9.  Take a Cold Shower This may sound silly, but taking a cold shower resets your nervous system releasing endorphans and calming you down it works wonders!⁴

Key Truths About Performance Anxiety

1) You can’t practice your performance anxiety away

In other words, getting up in front of people over and over again, isn’t going to resolve the problem regardless of what you may have read or heard to the contrary. The reason is simple. Performance anxiety is not a rational understanding by the conscious mind, it’s created by your subconscious mind to protect you from this imagined danger. ( It’s called a conditioned response) You will continue to respond to this situation exactly the same way you always have until you resolve it.

2) This will not go away by itself over time

“I had turned my anxiety into my profession”
Francois Jacob

I’m sure you’ve realized this already. Simply put you just can’t ignore it, or take time off from your career or your social life and then expect your performance anxiety to have disappeared on its own when you get back.⁵

2) Self Medicating With Drugs or Alchohol Will Make Anxiety Worse!

In fact it is actually making your life, your health and your performance much worse. If you are self-medicating to get yourself through presentations or performances, you are throwing away your career, your health, and your important relationships and you still will not have resolved your performance anxiety. When you resolve your this you’ll feel confident, in control and your performance will dramatically improve naturally, without the need for drugs or alcohol.⁶

4) PRESCRIPTION drugs don’t eliminate your performance anxiety

Instead they help you to manage it in return for a variety of side effects that definitely diminish your performance. A lot of presenters and performers from actors to classical musicians, to salespeople, to lawyers, talk about the use of beta-blockers and anti-anxiety drugs as a method to control their performance anxiety or stage fright or fear of public speaking as it is often called. The bottom line here is that you must resolve your performance anxiety, when you do, the feelings associated with it will disappear and so will your need for prescription drugs.⁷

5) Avoidance is certainly not a cure for performance anxiety

More often than not an individual will use avoidance as a means to manage their performance anxiety. The belief is that by avoiding such situations they are actually managing their problem. The truth is the total opposite, they are actually being managed by their fears and anxiety. For performers and presenters in particular, this choice can be a career threatening decision. At the very least, you pay a very high price with your mental and physical well-being, not to mention all the lost opportunities along the way.⁸

You Can Overcome Performance Anxiety

The goal of overcoming performance anxiety consists of effective management rather than complete elimination of nervousness. Propose preparation along with practice techniques in addition to appropriate strategies to focus your anxiety into productive energy. All performers deal with nerves but the essential goal should be developing methods to control these nerves which strengthen your performance capacity.

Learn more about the end the anxiety program today.

References

1. Wesner, R. B., Noyes, R., & Davis, T. L. (1990). The occurence of performance anxiety among musicians. Journal of Affective Disorders, 18(3), 177–185. https://doi.org/10.1016/0165-0327(90)90034-6 ‌[↩]
2. Ahmad, G. A. (2023). Student Factors Affecting Performance Anxiety. Tuijin Jishu/Journal of Propulsion Technology, 44(4), 606–610. https://doi.org/10.52783/tjjpt.v44.i4.896 ‌[↩]
3. Kenny, D. T. (2005). A Systematic Review of Treatments for Music Performance Anxiety. Anxiety Stress & Coping, 18(3), 183–208. https://doi.org/10.1080/10615800500167258 ‌[↩]
4. 6 cold shower benefits to consider. (2023, January 25). Uclahealth.org; UCLA Health. https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/6-cold-shower-benefits-consider#:~:text=In%20one%20clinical%20study%20(Link,Link%20opens%20in%20new%20window). ‌[↩]
5. https://www.facebook.com/WebMD. (2024). Overcoming Performance Anxiety in Music, Acting, Sports, and More. WebMD. https://www.webmd.com/anxiety-panic/stage-fright-performance-anxiety ‌[↩]
6. Depression, Anxiety, Alcohol and Other Drugs | Here to Help. (2018). Heretohelp.bc.ca. https://www.heretohelp.bc.ca/infosheet/depression-anxiety-alcohol-and-other-drugs ‌[↩]
7. Inglis, A. (2019). Is popping pills the sure way to beat performance nerves? The Strad. https://www.thestrad.com/is-popping-pills-the-sure-way-to-beat-performance-nerves/3133.article ‌[↩]
8. https://www.facebook.com/birchwoodclinic. (2024, September 6). Breadcrumb. Birchwood Clinic. https://www.birchwoodclinic.com/why-avoidance-worsens-anxiety-and-what-to-do-instead/#:~:text=One%20common%20response%20to%20anxiety,anxiety%20in%20the%20long%20run. ‌[↩]