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Barrier Busting
The Barrier Busting podcast offers insights, strategies, and inspiring stories that explore practical tips and powerful tools for unlocking our full potential.
Barrier Busting
Performance Anxiety: Understanding and Overcoming It
Performance anxiety can act as a major barrier to achieving personal and professional goals, often stemming from physiological responses and past experiences. Throughout the episode, we dive into the definition, symptoms, risk factors, and effective management strategies for performance anxiety, ultimately empowering listeners to conquer their fears.
• Explanation of performance anxiety and its characteristics
• Discussion of physical, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral symptoms
• Insights into risk factors such as genetics and personality traits
• Overview of various treatment options, including therapy and coaching
• Practical tips for managing performance anxiety through relaxation techniques, preparation, and physical activity
• Importance of mental rehearsal and visualization for success
• Encouragement to seek help and prioritize mental well-being
Are you feeling stuck, trapped by barriers holding you back from reaching your full potential? Well, let's bust through those barriers so that you can live your best life. Hi, I'm Matt Brooks, founder of Matt Brooks Coaching, and I'm passionate about helping people overcome barriers to achieve success. Join me for insights, strategies and inspiring stories as we explore practical tips and powerful tools to unlock your true potential. This is the Barrier Busting Podcast, and we're going to do a couple of episodes on this.
Speaker 1:I think we all experience this in some degree at some point in our lives. Right? Some nervousness before we have to do something in public. All that. It can even really freak us out, make us not sleep so well the night before, for instance. But for some people, performance anxiety can be very severe, even debilitating. Research shows that roughly 40% of people suffer from performance anxiety in one way or another, and I have a feeling that number's soft. I have a feeling that it's a bigger number than that.
Speaker 1:Now, the term performance anxiety doesn't just refer to performing on a stage, you know, like a dancer or musician or an actor. No, this could be anything where you're put on the spot, so it could be an office presentation you have to make. You can get performance anxiety before making a speech or interviewing for a job, or performing in a school play. Of course, even giving a toast at a wedding, it might be. It might happen to anything where you're going to be put on the spot. Okay, and you know what it feels like, right? Your palms get sweaty, your heart races, you feel anxious, maybe you have a pit in your stomach, right? Truth is, most people would rather get a root canal than get up in front of people and speak or perform. Right? There's nothing unnatural about that. Most of us do feel a degree of nervousness or discomfort when put in situations where we need to stand out in some way. However, when it becomes persistent, when it interferes with your quality of life or reaches the level of dread and panic, then it's full-on performance anxiety.
Speaker 1:So what is performance anxiety? How is it defined? Well, performance anxiety is simply an outsized stress response one can experience when being put on the spot. It's strong, excessive fear or worry that one won't be able to successfully accomplish a specific task, causing emotional and physical distress. It's excessive and sometimes debilitating feelings of nervousness and dread surrounding the completion of a specific task. Now, performance anxiety falls under the umbrella of anxiety disorders, but the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Health does not recognize it specifically. Performance anxiety typically falls under a category called social anxiety disorder, which is diagnosed when someone experiences persistent, intense fear or anxiety regarding specific social situations due to self-conscious concerns about being judged negatively, embarrassed or humiliated. So it's pretty much the same thing performance anxiety, social anxiety disorder. So it falls under that category. Thing. Performance anxiety, social anxiety disorder. So it falls under that category.
Speaker 1:Now, what happens inside of us with any anxiety is something called a physiological sympathetic activation. This is our body's immediate reaction to stressors. We have a part of the brain which is meant just for this. It's called the amygdala. It's a very small part of our brain and it goes into what we all know as fight or flight mode right, which is when our body releases cortisol or adrenaline.
Speaker 1:Now cortisol, often called the stress hormone, is also our body's alarm system. Okay, it prepares us to face a difficult situation. Cortisol increases our heart rate and breathing, heightens our eyesight, strengthens our immune system and slows down our digestion. It's meant to steal us for facing some type of challenge. It's natural, and a little bit of anxiety is actually a good thing. A little bit of cortisol from time to time is a good thing. It's healthy. It's what often propels us to achieve things in our lives.
Speaker 1:However, chronic stress and anxiety can cause our body's alarm system to be overworked, resulting in negative and often severe ramifications, often manifesting in physical problems like gastrointestinal problems, cardiac problems and a weakened immune system, all because of too much pressure from chronic cortisol. This is when it goes beyond simple butterflies or jitters but creates a heightened level of apprehension and can get in the way of achieving your goals. A heightened emotional state that has you on edge. In other words, instead of helping you, as your physiological sympathetic activation is supposed to do, as in keep you safe, it actually makes it harder to deal with the situation at hand, and often you screw up the situation at hand because the anxiety takes over. In all of this, fear is the prevailing force Fear of judgment, fear of humiliation, fear of failure.
Speaker 1:But performance anxiety is also enhanced by a number of other things, like memories of past experiences. Something bad happened in the past. You remember it. You don't forget that right? Maybe overly high expectations or perfectionism. If you're a perfectionist, you're going to have a lot of anxiety, and it comes from even biological factors. Sometimes this can be genetic. You might have some genetics that make you more prone to anxiety. There are actually, though, good reasons to fear. I'm not saying the fear is stupid or bad. There's real reasons to fear with performance anxiety. A failure could affect your career, it could affect your standing in the community, it could affect your self-esteem, your self-confidence, et cetera. It's hard to make a good impression or be at your best self when you're suffering from an episode of performance anxiety, and so it can really get in the way.
Speaker 1:Performance anxiety rears its ugly head in a number of different ways. There are physical symptoms, there are emotional symptoms, there are cognitive symptoms and there are behavioral symptoms. The physical symptoms are more obvious. Right, you get a racing pulse, you have heart palpitations, you have excessive sweating or sweaty palms. You have dry mouth or dry throat. You may have nausea or a stomach disturbance. Your muscles may become tense, your hands, legs and voice may shake. You might be short of breath. You might have sleeplessness. You might even experience changes in vision. Those are physical symptoms. Emotional symptoms like fear and worry, which negatively affect one's ability to focus, are also heightened when you have performance anxiety. In terms of cognitive symptoms, it's basically negative thought patterns, where we continually imagine the worst outcomes. Right that, coupled with self-criticism and doubt, unrealistic expectations and perfectionism there's that perfectionism thing again or obsessing and ruminating on failure. Those are all cognitive symptoms of performance anxiety. There are also some behavioral symptoms, as I mentioned. That's like withdrawing from social interaction, you know, hiding out, essentially avoiding situations that can trigger performance anxiety or actually doing the thing but displaying impaired performance during you know you doing the thing.
Speaker 1:It can happen. It's happened to me, I'm sure it's happened to many of you who are listening. Where you're, you have that anxiety, you're given the speech anyways and somehow that anxiety actually made it worse. Sometimes, actually, though, you don't even feel it. Sometimes you can feel totally calm and that performance anxiety can still get in the way.
Speaker 1:I remember a time in college where I had to give a presentation and it was a no brainer for me. I knew the stuff cold, I was totally prepared for this presentation. I practiced, I was ready to go for this presentation. I practiced, I was ready to go and I was completely calm day of and at the event, totally calm. I had no indication whatsoever that I was under any type of anxiety until about a minute in my right leg started shaking, and I mean noticeably shaking, not just to me but to everybody in the room. It wasn't just a little tremor. My leg was shaking and I was trying to stop it. I kept pounding my foot on the floor. Didn't work. I felt calm through the whole thing, though, despite the fact that my leg was shaking. I got anxiety over that, but I was fine with the speech. I don't know what happened there, but I do know that there was performance anxiety lurking underneath the surface and it came out in that way.
Speaker 1:Are there risk factors for performance anxiety, things that can make one more prone to experience it more severely, say, than others? Yes, there are Genetics, of course, is one. There's something called negative trait, affectivity right, this is a personality trait that places excessive focus on negative emotions. If you have that, you're more prone to performance anxiety. Neuroticism this is an inability to manage urges or stress, emotional instability or overreaction, especially, especially to perceived threats. Also, this is someone with a tendency to complain a lot. Pessimism, envy, anger, fear and guilt also come into play with neuroticism. That will make you more prone to performance anxiety. And, of course, introversion, which is a tendency to avoid social interactions and focus on one's own thoughts and feelings rather than those of shared experiences. People that are introverts like that will have a tendency to suffer a little more anxiety over performance or being put on the spot.
Speaker 1:Also, I have to say, persistent thoughts of failure, in which one mentally plays out or ruminates on potential negative outcomes. If that's something you do, you're more likely to have performance anxiety, because you're going to play this out in a really negative way with no real proof that that's what's going to happen. It's just your habit. Whatever the case, performance anxiety can come in varying degrees of severity, from apprehension to all out crippling fear in which one's mind can go blank. That happens too. Your mind can go blank. Has that ever happened to you? It's never happened to me, but I know that that's something that people have happened sometimes when their anxiety gets too much. We're going to take a quick break here, and when I return I'm going to talk about treatment options and share a bunch of tips for dealing with performance anxiety. Hang tight.
Speaker 2:Feeling overwhelmed, Struggling to find balance in your daily life? At Matt Brooks Coaching, we get it and we can help. With over 25 years of nonprofit executive experience and an MSW with a clinical focus, Matt Brooks offers personalized coaching designed to help you rise above your challenges and live your best life. Whether you aim to advance your career, enhance your skills or simply find more clarity and peace, Matt is here to be your partner and ally. Visit mattbrookscoachingcom to book your free discovery session today. Take the first step towards a brighter tomorrow.
Speaker 1:All right, I'm going to share some tips for reducing and managing symptoms of performance anxiety in a minute, but if your performance anxiety symptoms are severe and I mean really severe and they're negatively affecting your quality of life, your job, your relationships, et cetera, then you may want to consider treatment options. Okay, there are some options out there. There's therapy and there's coaching. There's both, and coaching will challenge beliefs and drill down for clarity and will work together to come up with solutions that will help you overcome your anxiety, which is not altogether different from most common therapeutic approaches. In therapy, there's a few different things you could consider. There's cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. This is empirically proven and it's commonly done. It's not hard to find a therapist who does CBT. In CBT, you'll identify and challenge negative thoughts, you'll visualize a positive outcome and you'll take action, thereby learning to redirect negative thoughts, beliefs, images and predictions. It's kind of like rewiring your brain or your thought process. There's also psychodynamic therapy, or better known as talk therapy. For some people, just having that safe space where you can talk to an ally who's not a personal friend, family member or coworker can make a huge difference. It's also where coaching comes in, or where coaching is similar because your coach will be an ally. That's the primary role of a coach, or at least how I do it. So if you want to have that ally, you can find one in therapy or in life coaching whatever works best for you. There's also a variety of other therapy approaches, like interpersonal therapy, rational emotive behavior therapy, dialectical behavior therapy and something called acceptance and commitment therapy. These are all versions of therapeutic approaches that will help you with anxiety in general and, in particular, if you have severe performance anxiety.
Speaker 1:There are medications, too, that can help you. Now, this, of course, is a discussion you need to have with a doctor. I'm not going to promote medication here. In fact, I typically, for me, try to avoid it. Unless it's really important, unless I really need to do it, I don't recommend it. I'm just mentioning that there are medications that can help with performance anxiety if really appropriate for your situation Again, something you've got to talk to your doctor about. The most common of these, of course, are beta blockers, and the reason those are used often is because it lowers your heart rate and blocks the effects of adrenaline. So if you're having that chronic cortisol, chronic adrenaline, the beta blockers help with that. But again, there can be downsides to medication. I'm not promoting it. I just want you to know that there are options you can visit with your doctor about if your performance anxiety is severe.
Speaker 1:Now, the good news is that, just like our body has a sympathetic nervous system which prepares the body for acting in a stressful situation, we also have something called the parasympathetic nervous system's rest and digest response. This is responsible for calming our body down after a stressful situation. There is a rest and digest sequence that follows when the stressful situation ends. All right, so you can think of it as there is light at the end of the tunnel. But we can, however, cut all of this off at the pass with a few techniques designed to release or relax the tension we feel in advance of and during the stressful moment when our performance anxiety kicks in. Essentially, an anxiety response is a pressure cooker of tension. Somehow we need to discharge that tension. So here's some proven ways to do that, and these are not in any particular order of importance.
Speaker 1:Okay, number one. Yes, of course I'm going to say it Exercise, eat a healthy diet and get enough sleep. I know you're sick of it. I say it all the time, everybody says it all the time, but there's a reason for that. These things really do make a difference in everything and, in particular, our response to stress. So exercise, eat a healthy diet and get enough sleep.
Speaker 1:Second is deep breathing exercises. You know we always hear that. We hear it it's kind of funny, but in through the nose, out through the mouth. Well, these things are really helpful. And do you know why it's in through the nose and out through the mouth? By the way, when you breathe in through your nose, you breathe deeper, you breathe to the diaphragm, not to the lungs, and more oxygen gets into your body, into your bloodstream. When you breathe out through the lips, you're actually releasing tension. So doing it in that sequence is really important to calming down stress.
Speaker 1:There's a couple techniques I want to tell you that you can do. If you're close to the moment, if you're like, say, right backstage before you got to give that TED Talk or something and you're starting to feel it. If you're like, say, right backstage before you got to give that TED talk or something and you're starting to feel it it's kicking in, try something called box breathing. This is something that Navy seals you. So, like you know, it works. Those folks have to keep pretty calm in some really stressful situations.
Speaker 1:So here's what box breathing is OK, it's into the nose, to the count of four, a slow four. You breathe in through your nose, then you hold your breath for that slow four. Then you release through your lips that slow four and then you hold for a slow four and repeat. So you're counting four slowly. You're breathing into the nose, so you're counting fours slowly. You're breathing in through the nose, then you hold your breath for four. You release over a count of four and then you hold for four and you do this several times. That's why they call it box breathing. It's going to help you.
Speaker 1:It doesn't take much time to do this. Now there's another one that I do if I have the time and the space, if I'm alone in a room, and I can do this. This one's really spectacular and it works for me every time. But again, this one's a little more time-consuming. It's essentially the same idea, only you count to 10. And when you're breathing, you sit in a chair and get your body as limp and relaxed as possible. Okay, then you breathe in through your nose, to the count of 10. And you're doing that, you tense up your muscles, in particular your fists, so that by the time you get to the 10, you're really tense and you hold that tension and that breath for a count of 10 and then you release the breath slowly and the tension slowly over a count of 10. Try that sometime, just once. You'll notice a big difference, okay. So deep breathing's really important to relieving the anxiety and stress Always going to come into play. There's other methods out there too. If you want to Google, you can find them, but those are two that I think are really helpful. And again, if box breathing works for the Navy SEALs, that's going to work for you, okay.
Speaker 1:Another tip is for dealing with performance anxiety or any anxiety really is relaxation techniques, meditation. Now, I'm not a meditation guy, it's not my thing, but I know a lot of people who are, and these are some pretty calm people, people that do this every day. They can really react to stress well. So meditation is a strong what do you say? A strong help in fighting stress and anxiety. So is yoga. People do yoga. There's something called progressive muscle relaxation, and there's other relaxation techniques. You can look those up on Google as well. All those are going to help you, especially if you do them daily, not just when you're going to feel some performance anxiety.
Speaker 1:Here's a big one On the day of the event that you have to be put on the spot and maybe for a few days leading up, limit your caffeine and sugar intake. Seriously limit your caffeine and sugar intake. Another one is visualize your success. Now I know some of you are like, oh yeah, he's saying visualize, come on, but really actually, this kind of works all right. Fantasize about succeeding. Play it out in your head what it looks like to succeed, what it feels like after the fact. Visualize it, it will help. Here's a big one, and this one's very hard to achieve, but it's really gonna help you if you can do it.
Speaker 1:Stay present. Stay in the present moment. Don't let your mind race ahead and focus on made-up scenarios that aren't grounded in reality, but rather are grounded out of fear. Don't do that. It's important to know that often, anxiety is caused by fear of anxiety. Let me say that again. A common cause of anxiety is fear of anxiety. Something happened to you. Once it stays with you, you worry about experiencing that again, and that worry escalates into full-blown anxiety. Bring your focus back to the present moment. What's happening right now? What do you see, what do you feel, what can you touch, what do you hear? Use your. You feel, what can you touch, what do you hear. Use your senses to get out of your head and experience the moment you're in.
Speaker 1:Now here's one that I love. This one's going to sound crazy, but I love it. Shake it off, seriously. I'm not talking about like you fall and you skin your knee when you're in fifth grade and you get up and somebody says, no, shake it off. I'm not talking about that kind of shake it off. I'm talking about literally shaking your body. Flail your arms, wiggle your body, jump up and down, try it, it works. Shake, shake, it works. In fact, I remember an opera singer I knew once who would jump up and down like a prize fighter backstage before a performance. It gets tension out, it works. So do whatever will work for you, but seriously shake it off. Another one here that I think is helpful is to shift the focus from yourself to what or who you are serving. Don't make it personal. See yourself playing a role. It's not you, it's the role.
Speaker 1:Now, in my old life I worked for nonprofits and I had to raise money, and there were times where I was in situations that were quite uncomfortable, where I was with people who were saying things that really bothered me or had very different political beliefs than me. Whatever, I had to keep quiet, I had to smile and nod because in that moment I was there to raise money for the cause that I was working for right. So in that situation, I wasn't Matt Brooks. I was the guy who was a fundraiser for the nonprofit that I was representing and I really tried to make a shift in my mind that way that I was representing and I really tried to make a shift in my mind that way that helped me stay focused on my goal and stay calm in the face of things that normally would really, frankly, piss me off.
Speaker 1:Here's another technique. I love this one and this really does work. You're gonna roll your eyes, but it really does work. Smile and laugh, even if you don't want to. Research has proven that smiling and laughing when experiencing stress can lower the intensity of the body's stress response. So, seriously, smile. And lastly, this is the most important tip I can give anyone for overcoming performance anxiety. This is the big one Be prepared, fully prepared, practice, practice, practice. Know your stuff so well and practice it so often that it becomes muscle memory and therefore will work, even if you're suddenly experiencing strong anxiety. Think about it. Why does people in the military, why does the military drill so often? They're drilling all the time. Why it's so that soldiers can spring into action, based in part on a kind of muscle memory and mental muscle memory, even when they're in highly stressful situations. That's why they drill.
Speaker 1:I'll give you a more pleasant example. When my son was in fifth grade he had to give a TED Talk. All the fifth graders in the school had to do this. It was like six minutes, I think, and he's not the get-up-in-public-speaker kind of guy. My son, he's a quieter, you know, introvert, not totally introverted, but a little more introverted than that. He's not really one to put himself at the front of the pack. He's one to work his butt off for the pack, but he's not really want to put himself at the front of the pack. He's wanting to work his butt off for the pack, but he's not really one to put himself front and center. So he was nervous about this. So I worked with him on that.
Speaker 1:And first thing is, I worked with him on certain memorization techniques, how he could memorize his speech and memorize it well, and then we drilled it every day. We drilled it every day because it was only six minutes. We could do it several times during the day. We could just call a quick drill and he would get up and do it for his mom or for me or whatever. So we did it every day and he really did it. We did it a lot. So now time for the speech at school, the TED Talk, and we couldn't go to that. It was just an in-school thing, but they did video it for us. So we got a video over email.
Speaker 1:This kid was cool as a cucumber I mean. He was so poised, he nailed it. He nailed it. Oh my God, I was so proud. And I asked him later. I said were you feeling nervous? He said, oh yeah, I was feeling really nervous. He didn't show it. It's because he prepared so well that it was on muscle memory.
Speaker 1:So that, above all the other techniques, that's the one that I can't stress enough. The better prepared you are, the calmer you're going to be okay, but all these techniques seriously are great for helping calm performance anxiety, but nothing compares to being fully prepared. Have I hammered that home enough? Do you think if I made that point. I think so. So that's all it is and that's all I got for today. That's a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1:I hope you found this helpful and interesting. Next week I'm going to have we're going to continue this topic, but I have an international opera coach coming on, someone who used to be an opera singer who now trains opera singers, works with people at every level of the business, including the highest levels of the business. He's been doing this for decades, so he's seen and experienced a lot of performance anxiety and he's got a lifetime of experience and knowledge with this. So I think he's going to be able to shed a lot of light on this for us from a practical standpoint. So I hope you'll check it out next week. Thanks for tuning in today. I hope you found this episode helpful. Please like or subscribe to this podcast so you can be notified each time I drop a new episode. For now, thanks for listening. Be well, and I'll catch you next time on the Barrier Busting Podcast. Thank you.
