The Neurobiology of Performance Anxiety
Your palms are sweaty, a tightening in your chest, a dropping of the stomach as the anticipation rises. You have been preparing for this moment (speech, show, game,etc), training and practicing and getting feedback from friends and colleagues. Your thoughts are racing and you wonder what it would be like to just run in the opposite direction as fast as you can. It’s like your body isn’t yours and your logical brain has gone on vacation or disappeared entirely. You are not alone. Performance anxiety is one of the most pervasive barriers to stepping into a desired creative life.
What is Happening in our Brain?
When we engage in any sort of performance, whether it’s giving a presentation at work or playing your instrument at a big show, there are a whole host of reactions present in our brain and body. Anxiety can cause performers to overthink the muscle memory that comes with focused and regular practice. The brain can “hijack” our thoroughly practiced art. Here are the various parts of the brain affected by this anxiety:
Amygdala:
Sometimes we can go into “fight, flight or freeze” response, which is when the amygdala is activated, sensing an extreme threat.The amygdala is the brain’s emotional center, and it’s job is to keep us away from danger. We are put under pressure and the amygdala treats the performance as a dangerous situation, releasing adrenaline and cortisol to help “save” us from the threat. This part of our brain is unable to differentiate between the anxiety over our upcoming performance and a life-threatening situation.
Prefrontal Cortex: This is our logical brain, responsible for decision making, planning, and impulse control. When experiencing performance anxiety, his part of the brain becomes overactive, causing the well practice routines to be disrupted. Instead of allowing our muscle memory to kick in that we have worked so hard for, the prefrontal cortex attempts to control, analyze or monitor our actions, disrupting our performance and creative “flow.”
Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) arousal creates the physical symptoms mentioned above like sweating, tightness in the chest, and racing thoughts.
The Vagus Nerve regulates the feeling of calm in the body. Under extreme pressure, the Vagus Nerve can become inhibited, leading to the loss of calm when under pressure.
Implicit Memory: aka muscle memory. In situations of high anxiety, there can be a disruption of our implicit memory, which is also created by practice and preparation and a shifting to our explicit or conscious monitoring, causing errors
Regulating the Nervous System Before a Performance
Anxiety can be a sign that we really value something, and we need a certain amount of anxiety as performers. Feeling anxious means that we care about something, and it gives us the motivation to practice, prepare, and take the steps to make the performance something to be proud of. We talked about how the sympathetic nervous system goes into overdrive when we struggle with performance anxiety. A way to counter that is to strengthen the parasympathetic nervous system. Here some ways to do that:
– deep breathing specifically allowing the exhale to be longer than the inhale.
– moving the body before performance (walking, dancing, running, shaking etc)
– Visualization
– pre-performance routine
Performing to your Best Ability
Performance anxiety can be debilitating, and you deserve to be able to express yourself and your creativity smoothly. With anxiety therapy, we can journey into expressive arts, psycho-drama, somatic regulation and mapping out a pre-performance routine. While the anxiety may never completely disappear, we can repurpose that feeling to energize you and express yourself through your creative modality.