David: I’ll give you a psychologist’s interpretation of it first. Anxiety is something that is quite natural and quite normal, which occurs when we feel threatened in some way. And that threat could be a sense of harm to ourselves, or even to someone else that we’re observing. So a music teacher for example, who’s got one of his students performing, can be more nervous than his student.

Jeremy: Absolutely, I know that feeling!

David: So that’s performance anxiety also. When we perceive there’s a threat to us or to someone we care about, we then get a range of reactions, including the physiological reactions commonly known as the fight/flight response. If you think of that in survival terms - why that’s hardwired into us - if we were threatened in the wild we’d either have to fight off this threat or escape from it. So there are two very strong responses which are totally opposite.

When we’re facing a threat like in performance, in fact nothing bad is going to happen to us. It’s not like someone is going to throw things at us that will harm us, or cause some physical injury. The threat really is more about what would happen “if my performance went wrong. I’d lose the respect of others, I’d lose self-esteem, it could affect my career…” all those sorts of things. So it’s more about social approval, the approval of others, that’s the threat. But you still get those physiological responses.

In one research study I taped up performers before, during and after a performance with heart-rate monitors. And what that showed was before a performance - coming into it - the heart-rate would go up, even though they were not performing, just hanging around. And it would seem to peak around the time they walked on stage. For less experienced performers it would generally stay high for a lot of the performance and then gradually taper off afterwards. What I think happens with professionals is that their heart-rate still peaks – and when I say peak, I mean really peak – it gets up to 160 beats per minute which is the same sort of heart-rate you might have if you were exercising vigorously. With the professionals, the heart-rate tends to drop quite quickly once the performance starts.

So you’re getting these strong physiological responses, you’re getting a lot of mental responses like self doubt, like “can I do this?”, if you’re feeling overwhelmed with anxiety.

Jeremy: I completely recognize that. OK, then, how do we deal with it as performers.

David: This is what I was trying to introduce in the book – a more systematic way of understanding the anxiety and therefore how to tackle it. So I think of it in three systems: the first system is the physiological one, the second system is behaviour (that’s what you actually do), and the third one is the mental – how you think about it. And that includes what you say to yourself about yourself in the performance situation, and also where you focus your attention.

If I look at the physiological one, in some ways there’s not a lot you can do physiologically. The main thing is to learn to keep your physiological response in check. That’s where I would suggest things like relaxation exercises, breathing awareness, physical techniques that you can use just to manage the build-up. And when I say build-up, that includes what’s sometimes called the stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. These chemicals are actually activating you for action, yet you don’t really start taking action until you are on the stage.

The second level is your behaviour. In the book I talk quite a lot about developing a pre-performance routine, so working out a routine that screens out distractions, and also that supports the right mental focus.

Jeremy: And I would imagine that that routine is going to be different for everybody.

David: It becomes an individual routine, that’s right. And everyone’s going to have some common elements. It’s things like Do I talk to others beforehand, or don’t I? How early do I arrive at the venue? Do I have a bit of a play or sing before the audience comes? Do I mingle with the audience or not? How do I spend that day, do I have a nap? What do I eat? Those sorts of things.

The third level is the mental, and in some ways this is the key. This is what we’ve got the most control over, although we don’t usually realise this. It’s about how we think about ourselves in the situation. So if we’re thinking about the performance as a threat, we’re clearly going to experience overwhelming anxiety. But if we think about the performance as more of a challenge or something that’s exciting to do, then we’re going to use that physiological energy that’s naturally being generated to energise us and actually to bring out a better performance.

Jeremy: It’s also going to help you to really look forward to what you’re going to do. I know I was very struck by this when I read it.

David: Exactly. So you’re trying to transform anxiety into excitement, and it’s that excitement that you want to cultivate. And you do that by reminding yourself – if you’re a singer you might be saying to yourself, “I’ve chosen the right songs, I’ve sung them before, they’ve worked well before, I can do this”. It’s like realistic self-statements that are based on past experience. The more you’ve performed, of course, the more you can believe those statements.

Jeremy: You’ve got some great quotes in your book, and there’s a particular one by Michael Crawford on Phantom of the Opera, which really chimes with that. Doing a performance in front of 22,000 people in San Francisco – I’m just reading it here – he hadn’t slept for a night and a half, and he says “At the last moment I realised that I had been rehearsing this for six weeks, that I’d played the Phantom for three and a half years, I must know the words by now.” I think that’s really good!

David: And I want to point out - how many other occupations are there where someone goes off to work in the morning, and they have this self doubt? Where someone says “I’m an accountant, am I going to remember how to add up? Am I going to remember how to do a tax return?” We’re really talking about a completely different type of work here. We’re talking about one that has incredibly intense highs and lows, and so this self-doubt, because we’re in a public forum, tends to grow quite easily if we don’t consciously manage it.

Jeremy: Yes. This is just a personal observation – when I first realised that this was a pattern, and that it was a pattern I kept going through about being very, very nervous beforehand and then really quite low afterwards – actually accepting as a pattern, that it was going to happen, really helped.