Performance Anxiety - what really helps and what doesn't

Racing heart, trembling hands, shallow breathing, pressure in the stomach - and the feeling of wanting to run away. Actually, we make music to experience joy and share it. Why do we sometimes fail to feel this joy?

Since I was affected by stage fright myself and felt great fear of death before certain performances, my suffering was very intense, and I tried to overcome these fears over many years. Along this path, I tried everything possible.

Most of it helped little or not at all. I would like to point out here the reasons why something is not helpful, what is missing, and of course, what in my experience it takes to heal this (and virtually any issue).

Most therapies and approaches do not work from my perspective because they do not consider the body and the functioning of the autonomic nervous system and neurophysiology, and because they do not distinguish between adult experience (presence) and childlike experience (regression).

But we are biological beings, and fundamentally everything originates from the body. The primary need of the body is safety.

If we don't start with the body, then we cannot bring about change where it is necessary, namely where the problem originated.

Everything we experience as suffering as adults always comes from the first three years of life at most. This means someone who has chronic stress - that's not today's stress, but it's always what was cemented into the nervous system in the relationship context from childhood.

What It Needs

It requires a body-oriented procedure or method for nervous system regulation, so that excess energy is discharged and the body can calm down again. Additionally, the unconscious inner conflicts that have developed from childhood attachment injuries must be examined and updated.

If this doesn't happen, we hear phrases like: just accept it. Or: just face your fear, and go on stage despite being afraid.

There is always some truth to these statements. But this only works if the resources for it are there. Sometimes one must first create the resources for someone to be able to do something with or despite fear.

People process experiences differently – some develop symptoms, others (seemingly!) do not. Here, among other things, it is crucial how much stability, basic trust, resilience, and resources we have been able to build up in our lives so far and how good our ability for self-regulation is.

These factors, by the way, can be trained.

When Mental Training Doesn't Help

Musicians frequently come to me for whom mental training alone hasn't worked. Here's the explanation:

When we suffer, we try to find a solution with our intellect; that's quite natural. However, it is designed to find solutions for real problems on the physical level. Example: if I need flour to bake bread, I can think about how to build a mill to produce flour.

The mind, however, cannot find the way out when we are stuck in unconscious destructive relationship patterns due to childhood experiences.

Especially also because the problem doesn't really exist anymore, but we keep re-enacting it. The mind cannot find a solution for this.

Often associated with this program are: will, doing, making, effort, strategies, etc. This is natural, but it leads nowhere.

It gives us hope for a future solution, but nothing changes.

If it were possible, we would simply do it. We would simply overcome our fears.

This cannot simply be 'worked on' from the outside. Because these are connections deep in the brain; mental training is not sufficient.

If I relax the system from the outside, e.g., with a massage, then during or shortly after, the stress is gone. But mostly it doesn't last. Why does it actually come back?

It comes back because at the level of the brain stem, it hasn't registered that the danger is over. This cannot register when it works from the outside.

Cause of Stage Fright

The way we grow up here, we can say that virtually everyone is affected by attachment trauma. We don't know how to really make contact and feel comfortable and relaxed while doing so.

When we deal with performance and stage anxiety that blocks us, there are early injuries from attachment trauma or shock trauma.

You might experience repeatedly that you know you don't need to be afraid, but that has no effect at all.

Because here the deeper levels in the brain take control. This is again very sensibly regulated from an evolutionary perspective because survival always takes precedence. But the problem is that when this over-arousal and immobilization becomes conditioning, then problems arise everywhere, which then manifest as symptoms.

Why Psychotherapy Often Doesn't Work

In psychotherapy (e.g., talk, gestalt, or behavioral therapy), the unresolved child parts are often directly taken care of, which often makes the situation much worse because I'm then implicitly telling the system that the projection is correct. Instead, the adult must be addressed, and then this adult learns to communicate the childhood parts.

The classic forms of therapy therefore don't work so well because the cause is not addressed. The cause is missing attachment and charge in the autonomic nervous system.

The classic forms of therapy reach at most to the limbic system, the area in the brain where it's about feelings and social interaction, but not the body-survival level of the brain stem, where all the trauma charge is bound. Because with stage and performance anxiety, it's about survival states of the body.

Through attachment and developmental trauma, a real distress is created in the body, which we cannot simply ignore.

Second: it requires a genuine connection between client and therapist/coach. This is only possible if the therapist or coach has lived through the madness themselves, the ego has so to speak died, and can completely let go in a relationship and has no fear of their own states or those of the client.

Only then is real attachment and healing possible.

Because: the missing complete contact leads to stress in the body, this leads to symptoms that we then compensate for and try to balance out, but we don't see the actual problem.

The coach or therapist must help with this.

I have gone through hell myself and now know what leads out of it.

If we want to find access to joy and our free expression, we need safety in the nervous system. Establishing this safety happens through various paths.

You can find additional essential steps toward this in my masterclass:

"Courageous is not one who knows no fear, courageous is one who knows fear and overcomes it" Khalil Gibran