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A new way to conquer performance anxiety

 A recent Harvard study found that people who experience performance anxiety actually cope better if they tell themselves to get excited, rather than telling themselves to be calm.

Whether you are into music, acting, sport, or simply have to speak in front of a group of people, performance anxiety is shared by many people. Before a performance, you might experience racing heart, sweating, and blushing, but usually the number one experience will be digestive complaints. Things like butterflies, nausea or feeling sick. The funny thing is that the physiological sensations of excitement are often quite similar to the feelings of anxiety.

When you feel anxious, you are usually thinking about all the bad things that could happen. In contrast, when you are excited, you are focusing on all the positive things that might happen. Some nerves before a performance is actually a good thing – it keeps you focused, motivated and helps you to stay alert. For some people, telling yourself to calm down or relax before a performance actually might not work very well.

In the first part of the Harvard study, participants were told to prepare to engage in a public speaking event in which they would be filmed and judged by a committee. Before delivering their speech, participants were asked to practice saying “I’m excited” or “I’m calm”. The people who psyched themselves into being excited tended to perform much better.

In a further experiment, people were invited to participate in karaoke while their heart rate was monitored. They were randomly asked to tell themselves that they were anxious, excited, calm, angry or sad. The people who were instructed to focus on being excited about singing scored approximately 80 percent higher than other participants, based on their pitch, rhythm and volume.

So, at a physiological level, anxiety and excitement are pretty indistinguishable. In both instances, heart rate increases, stomach butterflies emerge, and people tend to sweat. Teaching yourself to cope with these feelings may come down to what it is you are saying to yourself before a performance. Since anxiety and excitement feel so similar, it might be easier to turn anxious feelings into excitement than it is to try to dissolve them into feeling relaxed. Even if you’re not immediately convinced, keep trying because the way that you talk to yourself has a powerful influence on your physiology. Rather than telling yourself to “keep calm” or “just relax” in a performance situation, try identifying the positive, exciting things about the performance. Of course, it’s important to acknowledge and accept that you are nervous and that this is normal. This technique is certainly not about denying the nerves, but it’s about gently suggesting an alternative way of thinking that might be more achievable.

What you can do to help performance anxiety

• Write or draw about the upcoming performance. Put an emphasis on including all the good, exciting things you’d like to happen (e.g., “here I am kicking a goal and feeling great!”, or “the audience will like my joke and smile at me”). A recent study published in Science found that people who wrote about their anxieties before an upcoming test tended to perform better. 

• Challenge yourself, your friends and your family to be regularly trying new activities that you think you might not be instantly good at. Too often, our self-esteem becomes tied with achievement because we are so afraid of failure.

• Spend time in activities that have no clear success or failure point. Things like meditation, yoga, and laughter groups are great because they help focus on continually developing life-long skills rather than achievement. 

• Remember that learning requires ups and downs, and practice makes progress. 

Source

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” ― Ernest Hemingway

  To me this simply means that with a deeper understanding comes a deeper search for happiness, a deeper need for personal development to reach that state of contentment, of Happiness.

  Your foundations in contentment need to be deeper and stronger as you are more susceptible to the winds of discontent.

  Obviously the cynical view is that with a simple mind, comes simple pleasures. While not always untrue it doesn't do anything for the 'intelligent people' other than making them envy those of simpler minds or look down on the contented for having a lack of understanding.

Please share your thoughts and feelings, this is an interesting topic with many points of view. I look forward to discussing it with you.