How to Overcome Performance Anxiety: Use the Nerves Instead of Fighting Them

About this tool

Performance anxiety is the fear and bodily arousal that arrives when you have to do something in front of others, or under evaluation, and the outcome matters to you. It shows up before a presentation, a recital, a match, an exam, a job interview, a court appearance, and in the bedroom. The symptoms are the same across settings: a fast heart, shaky hands, dry mouth, a tight stomach, racing or blank thoughts, and a strong urge to get it over with or get out. Learning how to overcome performance anxiety does not mean learning to switch that response off. It means learning to carry it into the performance without letting it run the show, and most of the techniques that work are about what you do with the arousal, not how to remove it.

The starting point is that some arousal helps. In 1908 Robert Yerkes and John Dodson reported that mice learned a discrimination task best under moderate rather than weak or strong electric shocks, and the finding grew into the Yerkes-Dodson law: performance rises with arousal up to a point, then falls. The tidy inverted U drawn in most textbooks is a later simplification, and the original study was narrower than its reputation: mice, not people, and one learning task. The broad idea, that some arousal helps and too much hurts, is a useful working model rather than a settled law of human performance, and where the peak sits varies with the task and the person. A flat, bored performer tends to do badly. A moderately keyed-up one tends to do well. Trouble tends to start when arousal climbs to the point where attention narrows, working memory has less room, and fine motor control gets noisy. The practical question is therefore not how to feel nothing, but how to stay on the useful side of the curve.

One well-studied shift is reappraisal. In a 2014 series of experiments, Alison Wood Brooks asked people to say 'I am excited' before singing karaoke, giving a speech, or doing timed math, and compared them with people told to say 'I am calm' or nothing. The excited group performed better and reported more positive feelings. Brooks' explanation is that anxiety and excitement are both high-arousal states, and trying to drop from high arousal to calm is a long way to travel in thirty seconds. Relabeling the arousal as excitement is a short step that keeps the energy and changes its meaning. Related work by Jeremy Jamieson and colleagues showed that people taught to read a pounding heart as a resource that helps performance showed healthier cardiovascular responses and did better under pressure. These are lab studies of particular tasks with modest effects. Reappraisal is not a cure and not the best option for everyone, but it is cheap and immediate, and it compares well with suppression, the thing most people try instead, which has a poor record in emotion-regulation research.

The second pillar is a pre-performance routine. Sport psychologists have studied these for decades, and Stewart Cotterill's review of the research describes them as a consistent sequence of thoughts and actions run before a skill, whose job is to put attention where it belongs. Golfers, free-throw shooters and penalty takers use them; so do concert musicians and experienced speakers, usually without the label. A good routine is short, physical, and always the same: a slow exhale, a stretch or shake of the hands, a cue word, a glance at the first line or the first note, and a decision about where your eyes go. The routine does not calm you so much as it gives the nervous system a familiar path to follow when the mind wants to spiral. It also replaces the ritual most anxious performers already run, which is rehearsing the failure.

Attention is the third piece. Performance anxiety pulls attention inward, toward your heart rate, your shaking hands, and the imagined verdict of the audience. Masters and Johnson called the sexual version of this spectatoring, watching yourself instead of taking part, and the same thing happens at a podium. Skilled performance runs largely on automatic processes, and watching them closely breaks them. The remedy is to choose, in advance, an external focus: the first sentence, the person in the third row, the feel of the strings, the ball. If attention drifts inward, you bring it back, as many times as needed. This is the same move as in mindfulness practice, and it improves with rehearsal.

Performance anxiety also fades with repeated performing, provided the performances are survivable and you stay in them rather than escaping. Musicians, actors and speakers who perform often report less anxiety over time, and the research on music performance anxiety reviewed by Dianna Kenny supports graded practice performances as a core treatment component, alongside cognitive work. Avoiding performances, or getting through them with safety behaviors such as reading every word from a script or never looking up, keeps the fear intact. Some performers ask a physician about medication for specific events; that is a medical conversation, and nothing on this page should be read as advice for or against it.

Sometimes what looks like performance anxiety is social anxiety disorder, and the line between them is not drawn by counting situations. Performance anxiety is a description, not a diagnosis: it can be ordinary nerves that pass, or it can be persistent and impairing. The DSM-5 recognizes a 'performance only' form of social anxiety disorder, so a fear limited to speaking or performing can still meet the criteria if it is persistent, out of proportion, distressing and gets in the way of work, study or the things you want to do. If the fear of being judged also spreads to ordinary interactions, parties, phone calls, eating in front of others or speaking up in groups, that is a wider pattern of the same condition, which responds well to cognitive behavioral therapy. Either way, the diagnosis depends on a professional assessment of persistence, distress, impairment and context. The Social Anxiety Test linked below is a screening tool, not a diagnosis, and a clinician can tell you which pattern fits.

Sexual performance anxiety deserves its own brief note, because it is one of the most common forms and the least talked about. The mechanism is identical: fear of failing, self-monitoring, and a stress response that works directly against arousal. The reframing and attention techniques here apply, but this page is not the place for it. If it is persistent, see a doctor first to rule out physical contributors, and consider a sex therapist, who treats exactly this. A performance fear that has started to shape your career choices, your relationships, or your health is also a reason to see a therapist; anxiety specialists treat performance fear routinely, and Psychology.com's directory lets you search by specialty, including anxiety, at no cost.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Reviewed the account of arousal and performance, the reappraisal evidence, and the distinction from social anxiety disorder for accuracy.

References

1. Yerkes RM, Dodson JD. The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation. J Comp Neurol Psychol. 1908;18(5):459-482.
2. Brooks AW. Get excited: reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement. J Exp Psychol Gen. 2014;143(3):1144-1158.
3. Jamieson JP, Mendes WB, Nock MK. Improving acute stress responses: the power of reappraisal. Curr Dir Psychol Sci. 2013;22(1):51-56.
4. Cotterill S. Pre-performance routines in sport: current understanding and future directions. Int Rev Sport Exerc Psychol. 2010;3(2):132-153.
5. Kenny DT. The Psychology of Music Performance Anxiety. Oxford University Press; 2011.

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