Stage Fright or Trauma? Why Musicians need to regulate their Nervous System to play freely

Do you still remember how that felt?

The audition at the music school as a child, where the teacher stood up wordlessly after a mistake, turned her back on you, and left you sitting in an icy silence for minutes. The moment during your university studies, when the professor cut you off in the middle of a difficult passage, stared at you wordlessly for seconds, and then, in front of your peers, only dryly said: “Just leave it, nothing good is going to come of this today.” Or the rehearsal in a professional orchestra, where the conductor stops the entire tutti, makes you play a passage three times all by yourself, and says absolutely nothing to you afterward – but only demonstratively shakes his head and looks pityingly toward the principal.

Sometimes, it doesn't even require a musical context. Growing up in a family where love was tied to performance, or where the parents' moods were so unpredictable that as a child you constantly had to keep your antennae out just to avoid making a single mistake, is more than enough.

We often write this off as "normal pressure" or a "hard school." But for our nervous system, these situations were something completely different: a shock, attachment, or developmental trauma. A massive state of overwhelm – sudden, unpredictable, and deeply humiliating.

I know this from my own biography all too well. I had more of these situations in my life than I wanted to admit for a long time. For years, I thought I had left it all behind – at least in my head. I had analyzed it, understood it, and checked it off. And yet, at some point, I had to make a painful discovery: As soon as I entered certain rehearsal rooms or a conductor struck a certain, sharp tone, my body was already in alarm mode before my mind could even react. A tight chest. Shallower breathing. That quiet but unmistakable impulse to make yourself invisible from the inside out.

The nervous system has no internal clock. It does not know that the audition was twenty years ago or that childhood was half a life away. It stores the context and sounds the alarm to protect you.

I know that nothing will happen to me today – so why does everything still tighten up?

“Trauma is a matter of biology, not psychology. It takes place in the body, not in the mind.” – Peter Levine

In my work with musicians, I hear this sentence almost daily: “But that was ages ago. I must have overcome that by now!”

To understand why the body seemingly deserts us in these moments, it helps to take a look at our brain. Evolutionarily speaking, we possess three parts of the brain: the thinking neocortex (our mind), the emotional limbic system, and the ancient reptilian brain, which is responsible for our survival reflexes.

When we experienced those overwhelming moments back then at the music school or in the orchestra, the reptilian brain took command in the blink of an eye. In such moments of stress, it simply shuts down the rational mind. Because the nervous system stores experiences purely physically, it reacts today in similar situations (stage, rehearsal room, critical glances) immediately with the same old survival reflexes – completely regardless of how much we rationally know about it.

You function on stage, but inside, your world is on fire

he real problem is this: Back then, you couldn't flee the situation, you couldn't stand up and leave the room. You had to keep playing. You had to function.

The enormous stress energy that your body mobilized within seconds had nowhere to go. It got stuck in the system – in the tissue, in the diaphragm, in the way your shoulders reflexively shrug as soon as you unpack your instrument.

In modern trauma work, we like to compare such a blocked nervous system to a car: Sometimes the system gets stuck on "ON." That is the permanent gas pedal: racing heart, trembling, uncontrolled, racing thoughts at the moment of playing. Sometimes, out of pure overload protection, it throws the emergency brake and gets stuck on "OFF."

This is the classic freeze state: sudden blackouts on stage, numbness in the fingers, or the feeling of being frozen and not really present in your own body at all. And often, musicians experience both simultaneously – as if you were flooring the gas pedal and the brake with all your might at the same time. The internal wear and tear on body and soul is immense.

Many then try to train this away with mental strength or even more discipline. But by doing so, you only drown out the signals until the connection to your own body becomes thinner and thinner.

When the old charge leaves, the music returns

Today I know: You can renegotiate this with the nervous system. I have walked this path myself, and I have walked it with countless clients. When we show the body that the danger from back then is over, this old charge releases.

What changes because of this?

You finally arrive in your own body. You no longer have to run away from any symptoms. As the blockages dissolve, everything inside you calms down, and with that, the stage fright leaves as well. It is as if a constant, underlying background noise finally falls silent. You notice it when you sit in the backstage area before a performance and simply breathe in, without that tight, sticky feeling rising in your chest. You are just there.

This has such a profound impact on your music-making. Not only because you can express yourself much better, but because you feel liberated in your body and simply rev up much less in difficult situations. Your self-worth suddenly no longer depends on how the rehearsal goes or what kind of look is thrown at you from the conductor's podium.

If you want to dive deeper into these connections, feel free to get in touch with me. I work with musicians and help them to feel confident, secure and effortless in their body and music making.