We all know more than we’d like to about bad stress. It can erode our enjoyment of life, make our relationships troubled, and even shorten our lives. But did you know that there is such a thing as good stress? This concept comes as a surprise to many people until they think about the many times stress actually helped them perform better and achieve more:
When you stepped in front of an audience, your nerves propelled you to a new, higher level of performance. In your heightened state, you were able to playfully interact with other characters, make inspired new interpretive choices on the spot, and otherwise “raise the bar” higher than what you had achieved before in performance. Stress helped you. It propelled you into a state of flow.
When preparing a role, you were obsessing over one aria (or ensemble, or recitative) that posed particular problems to you. Struggling with that problem might not have been very pleasant, but the process let you grow significantly as a performer. Again, good stress was helping you out. It was directing your attention to a weak area where you could achieve the greatest growth.
You could doubtless cite personal examples of times when good stress assisted you. Good stress does indeed exist, and it was first defined more than 50 years ago by a scientist named Hans Selye. As I researched my new book Good Stress, Bad Stress, I learned a great deal about it. Simply put, good stress is the kind that challenges us, allows us to grow, and offers desirable outcomes we can reach for. Bad stress does none of those things. It limits us and offers no desirable outcomes. Two common examples of bad stress include dead-end repetitive jobs and serious chronic illnesses we can only manage, not cure. Lots of new research is proving that good stress actually strengthens our immune system, in contrast to bad stress, which causes physical harm.
Unlocking the Good Stress in Performance Anxiety
All this news about good stress might sound good to you, but you are probably thinking, “What about the times when I get so nervous, I actually perform at a lower level than I did in my coach’s studio, or in rehearsals? What about the times when I’m shaking, and can’t control my nerves? What about that time I forgot a word and couldn’t get back on track?”
Those are good, reality-based questions to ask. In those stressful situations, our ability to unlock the good opportunities within stress vanishes. Our anxiety surges, and we can find no simple cure. The solution lies in finding ways to understand, and combat, the specific anxieties that are most likely to strike us.
The fear that something will go wrong and we won’t be able to recover: Such “catastrophizing” is a natural mental process most of us engage in before high-stakes events. Fear takes over and increases the odds that we really will be immobilized if we forget a line, our accompanist’s score falls on the floor, or some other mishap occurs. There is a fallacy at the root of such worries . . .
The belief that if one thing goes wrong, everything else will then go wrong, too:
It’s a “house of cards” scenario that makes whatever you are about to do appear much more risky than it really is. One effective way to counter this problem is to stage rehearsals in which you make sure things really do go wrong, so you can then master the specific skills to bring your performance back under control. Example: In the studio while preparing an audition aria, tell your coach that you are going to try an experiment, and that you must both complete your performance of the piece, no matter what. Then midway through the aria, reach across the music stand and knock her score into her lap. See what happens. Chances are that you will both find a way to complete the performance. Or invite a friend to a rehearsal and invite him to yell “stop!” three or four times, or to disrupt the session every five minutes in some new and surprising way. When you rehearse your imagined catastrophes, their remedies become a part of your skill set. If things go wrong, you know you can deal with them flexibly and keep moving ahead.
Real-world example: When a college volleyball player was psyched out and having a terrible time getting her serve in, she told her team at one practice, “Okay, I am going to intentionally serve badly.” She served the ball way out of bounds four or five times, then gradually brought her serve back onto the court. In this way, she taught herself the specific recovery skills she needed to manage her problem without letting it get the best of her.
The fear that nerves will keep you from doing your best: Perhaps you are comparing your “best” performance (possibly the one you achieved in the studio or the last time you performed the role) to the imaginary one that will occur at the stress-inducing event itself. You start to worry about it. How can you ever repeat your best performance, which you achieved before, at the event itself?
This fear, though based on an exaggeration (“If I don’t perform perfectly, my performance won’t be any good”), does have a basis in reality. No matter how much you practice, your performance at the event itself really will not be precisely the same as what you achieved in the studio. Nerves or other factors really will cause your actual performance to be different. You might do better, you might do worse. Only time will tell. Yet you can actually rehearse nerves and learn that, bad as they are, they lack the power to completely derail you.
Dr. Don Greene, a psychotherapist who teaches wonderful courses at Juilliard on overcoming extreme performance anxiety, has developed an exercise that is helpful in handling severe pre-performance nerves. He asks people who suffer from acute nerves to actually run up a few flights of stairs to simulate a nervous state. For example, a pianist will run up those stairs, race to a piano, sit down and start to play. Through this exercise, people who suffer from performance anxiety discover the skills they need to start their performances capably, even with sweaty palms, a pounding heart and heavy breathing. As they pant and shake, they can “center” by taking some deep breaths and soldiering on until they regain control of themselves. Because they then know the sensations of starting a performance with extreme stress, they master a behavior pattern that transfers directly to performing.
Inability to calm down: You have certainly encountered this problem. Just before you stepped onto the stage, nervousness made you say, “I have to relax, I need to calm down.”
If you succumb to this fear, you are setting up false expectations by telling yourself, “I can only do well if I feel calm.” The real goal should be to direct your excess energy so that it will boost your performance instead of sabotaging it.
One good technique is to channel your nervous energy toward a small, highly focused goal. Dr. Harry Olson, a clinical psychologist and author of the book The New Way to Compete, told me about a tennis pro who would crumble before aggressive, hard-charging opponents. Dr. Olson advised him to consciously forget there was an opponent on the other side of the net and to concentrate all his attention on the simple act of returning the ball. That simple focus helped him stay in the game. Sometimes, he could even gain an edge and turn the game to his advantage.
Simply focusing on a small, well-defined goal can be one of the most effective ways to put nervous energy to your advantage. Instead of trying to juggle multiple concerns at the same time (the fact that the audience did not laugh where you thought they would, the frown on your conductor’s face, the fact that the baritone who is singing the Don to your Zerlina is upstaging you), stick with one simple thing that is well within your control, like taking a calm, relaxed breath between phrases or listening intently to the meaning of the baritone’s words as he “speaks” his lines to you. Like that tennis player, you will soon gain inner focus that will turn undifferentiated “nerves” into a flow of good and useful energy. Remember, you can’t control everything at once, but you can control one thing.
Note on auditioning: In my own years as a performer, and in many interviews I conducted with singers, I came to the firm belief that the strongest auditioners were those who could define one central aspect to their vocal technique (something extremely easy to control!) and focus only on that in the first moments after they had stepped onto the audition stage. It might be something as simple as feeling each vowel’s focus just behind your front teeth. Such an elemental, simple focus seems to be more effective than trying to coordinate five or six complex factors at the same time. Yet how many of us put ourselves in just that tough spot? The minute an audition begins, we’re thinking, “My teacher said I should use my chest voice in this first bar…I have to project Carmen’s sexiness…my dress feels funny…I’m not getting any acoustic feedback in this dead room… my accompanist never plays it this fast…the auditioning panel isn’t even looking at me…that last singer sounded fantastic…” Nothing cuts through all that clutter better than singular, simple focus. Once that is in place, the chest voice, sexiness and other elements can be ladled on. And if things start to go wrong in the audition, returning to the simple technical focus can quickly put things back on track.
Remember, Butterflies are Good!
There is still another tie between nerves and peak performance. The “butterflies” you feel when you are attempting something significant can be a sure sign that you are doing exactly what you should be doing with your life. Terrie Williams, a vibrant woman who is a major force in the world of public relations, told me that she has actually learned to welcome butterflies as a sure sign that she is attempting something that will stretch her into new realms of achievement. (She once walked up to Miles Davis, whom she did not know, and said “I want to be your PR agent.” It worked!)
If we’re living without butterflies, she says, we’re not risking enough to move our lives to a higher level. Without testing our limits through good stress, we would never grow. You have a great opportunity to do just that, the next time you step onto the stage.
