(republished from my studio newsletter in 2024)
Hang with me through the setup - we need it to get to the point in the title. This year, the ICA Health & Wellness Committee has been focusing on mental health, primarily in the area of performance anxiety. It has come at a rather fitting time, as personally, my anxiety levels have been quite high. Last year, I had just parked to go pick up some groceries, and before I had even gotten out of the car, I started feeling some unfamiliar symptoms. It took me several minutes sitting in the car to come up with an anxiety attack as a possibility, then several minutes more to calm myself enough to complete the errand at the store, then the rest of the afternoon and evening to settle down back to “normal.” The experience prompted me to do some research on this, but before I had gotten very far on it, I had another event sitting in a church service. Things were quieter for a little while, but this has been a rough summer with LOTS of external factors, and I’ve had two more anxiety attacks. These both coincided with performances - one right before the tuning pitch for the fireworks concert on July 4th, the other a church service in which I was improvising on multiple woodwind instruments.
Here’s where we get back to the title of this article. In these latter two cases, where my chest tightened, by breathing stilled, and my mind was flooded with noise, it wasn’t the thought of playing my instrument that brought on that rush of cortisol. I can’t look at those two instances and instantly assign “performance anxiety” as the cause. Did they happen while I was supposed to be performing? Yes. But then, I perform frequently, so the likelihood of an event like this coinciding with a performance is pretty high. I mean, I can’t exactly credit my first one at the grocery store to performance anxiety. I can, however, look at the multiple factors in this season of my life and easily see how the external stress and my internal processing of it could lead to a sometimes overwhelming feeling of anxiety. Further, I have seen how applying some great advice from mental health professionals has helped to stabilize me and help me follow through on my work. The instrument didn’t cause it, but because I needed bandwidth to do my job as a musician, I really noticed when that bandwidth wasn’t there.
This idea applies to physical problems, too. I have a student who is working with a physical therapist right now because he’s having shoulder and neck pain. He’s played saxophone for many years, so he did what so many musicians do and thought immediately that it must be the weight of his instrument on the neck strap. One of the first questions I asked him was if he only feels the pain when he’s playing, to which he said no. It was worse at the same time every day, when he was away from his instrument. Now, that’s not a conclusive statement. Rather, it’s a question that opens the door to more questions: is it really the saxophone that’s causing the problem, or is there something else during his day-to-day causing muscle dysfunction that affects how he feels when he is playing? PT can help answer these questions and address the problem, rather than presuming and giving a self-diagnosis.
Let’s be clear: sometimes, it IS something about the way you are playing your instrument. I have a student who brought up in her first lesson that she felt pain in her face when she played. After watching her play in that first lesson, I could immediately see why, and after we made the correction, she was so excited that she saw instant results. It made her want to go practice!
Sometimes, it is indeed the instrument, whether it be a mental health issue or a physical issue. But, just because your symptoms become more apparent when you are trying to use the muscles or the mental skills to play, it doesn’t automatically mean playing is the cause. We cannot jump to that conclusion without seeking knowledgable help.
By the way, I’m going to be fine. I can see the conditions that have added up to make me feel a heightened level of stress, I can accept that a level of uneasiness is to be expected under these conditions, I’m developing strategies of reducing the pressure, and I’ve learned methods to help me calm the occasional spill-over into panic. If this sounds familiar to experiences in your own life, you can do something about it and seek some coaching from a counselor or therapist. You are not the only one who feels this way. It’s normal to experience anxiety from time to time, and there are real-world, constructive ways to deal with it.
