How can I handle performance anxiety or stage fright?

Anya sat waiting for the scene to be called by the director. As she sat, she felt the familiar heavy weight on her chest. It was like a wild animal that slunk in and weighed heavily on her every time she had to perform.

When rehearsing her character, she was able to let go, connect deeply with her emotions, and lose her self-consciousness. She became her character and felt completely present. She spoke and moved naturally.

After her performance, she felt palpably different, and the feedback she got from her peers reflected this. They felt gripped and impacted by her.

And yet, typically, when the stakes were really high, the anxiety monster came along and occupied its usual spot on her chest. Her throat constricted. She found it harder to breathe. She breathed more shallowly and quickly, but it didn’t feel like she could get enough air. This panicked her.

She also felt panicked remembering how she had reacted in the past to the anxiety monster and anticipating that it would happen again.

So she ended up in a vicious circle of panic—panicking about not being able to breathe, panicking about the anxiety monster not moving away, and worrying about how that would affect her acting. The more she panicked, the more she panicked, and the further away she got from herself. The more ungrounded she felt, the more she was in her thoughts, and the stiffer and less authentic she became in her performance.

Can you relate to this? As an actress and acting coach I can.

So what are some therapy techniques to handle performance anxiety or stage fright?

1. Identify and Replace Negative Beliefs

Firstly, we can examine what negative beliefs are lurking about. Negative beliefs fall into four categories: powerlessness, responsibility, worth, and safety. We know there is a negative belief at play when we react in a way that is disproportionate to the situation.

Anya’s reaction is disproportionate because she has chosen to perform, she has done the work, and the audience is not a machete-wielding crowd.

We don’t walk around holding a placard above our heads expressing these beliefs. We have to get to them, a bit like doing detective work. We do this by exploring the catastrophic fantasy.

For example, when Anya (an amalgamation of a few clients) came to me for acting coaching, we examined her negative beliefs with me. I asked her: “So what’s the catastrophic fear for when you get on stage?”

“Well, I think it’s that people will judge me and think I’m acting terribly,” she replied.

“And what would be the worst thing about that?” I challenged her.

“I’d feel so mortified.”

“And what would be the worst thing about that?”

“I don’t know,” she sighed deeply, feeling sad.

“Is it that you’d feel ostracized and rejected?”

“Yes,” she said and tears rolled down her cheeks.

We identified that her negative belief was about not belonging—that she would be judged harshly and ostracized. I knew we had got to the negative belief because she connected with emotion.

This is what her nervous system was reacting to. Of course, if our nervous system believes it’s on the verge of being ostracized from the rest of the human race, it’s going to make us feel highly anxious.

Hold It Up to the Light

The first step is to hold the belief up to the light, examine it, and disprove it. Is it necessarily true that everyone in the audience is judging her harshly? What is the evidence for and against this?

Based on feedback from past performances, Anya knows this is not true. And even if some are criticizing her acting, does that mean she’ll be banished from society? No, of course not.

Replace with More Helpful Beliefs

As an acting coach I ask my clients, “what are beliefs that feel better but aren’t too much of a stretch to embrace?” For example:

• “It’s safe for me to act.”
• “I can make mistakes and still belong.”
• “My worth is independent of my acting.”

Try them out for size. Adjust and change these beliefs to make them your own. Just be sure not to include negative words, as the human mind will pick up on the negative and ignore the positive.

For example, rather than saying, “Acting isn’t scary,” say, “I’m safe when I’m acting.” Notice how the new phrase feels in your body. If it feels freeing, relaxing, or uplifting, then keep it and say it often.

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Another way I support clients with performance anxiety, as an acting coach and therapist is to……

2. Explore Where the Negative Belief Came From

How did you pick up this belief about being judged by others and then ostracized? Beliefs develop in response to experiences. How and when did your belief originate? This is where we might use the “traceback” method used in EMDR and other therapies.

In an acting coaching session, I asked Anya to connect with a still-frame image of the worst part of her stage fright experience. I asked her to metaphorically run the movie of her stage fright and stop at the picture that felt the worst.

When I asked Anya to do this, the worst image was her sitting in the dark of the toilet cubicle on her own, 10 minutes before she had to go public.

I then asked her, “As you think of that image, what are you feeling in your body?” She identified a curdling feeling in her gut.

“What is the feeling that goes with that?”

“Fear,” she said.

We had previously identified the negative belief: “I don’t belong.”

I asked her to picture herself in the toilet, connect with the fear in her gut and the thought, “I don’t belong,” and then trace back in time, allowing random memories to flip through her mind and see where she ended up. I told her not to overthink it but trust the process.

She ended up in the playground at school, being bullied by the other girls who were envious of her because she got good marks. Anya felt baffled about why she had remembered that scene, having forgotten it for so long.

As an acting coach and therapist I wasn’t surprised at all. I explained that we don’t need to know why we remember something. It doesn’t need to make logical sense. If the memory comes up, it is somehow relevant.

Simply being aware of the root of the belief can help weaken it. Anya recognized that the audience wasn’t the group of bullies at school. She was also aware that she was no longer the vulnerable 13-year-old in a new school.

She can stand up for herself now. She knew that the bullying happened not because there was something wrong with her but because the girls were envious of her.

We then processed the belief with bilateral stimulation and EMDR therapy.

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As an acting coach and therapist another tool to I suggest to tackle performance anxiety is to……

3. Witness the Fear

A Gestalt Therapy way to process fear is to sit with it. I invited another client of mine, Marc, who also experienced stage fright, to sit and notice the fear. I asked him to imagine watching it as if he were watching an exotic bird on a birdwatching trip in the jungle—just watching without getting too involved or invested.

• Where does he feel it?
• Does it move? If so, how? Pulsating, vibrating, squirming, squishing?
• Is it warm or cold?

At the same time, I asked him to breathe through it—not trying to breathe it away but giving it a lot of breath. Emotions are like waves. They ebb and flow. If we constantly try to avoid or squash them, they feel incredibly powerful, like trying to stop a wave crashing onto the shore.

Instead, if we let the wave crash, it loses its power and dissipates. Similarly, if we allow emotions to fully ride out, they lose their power and are processed.

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4. Reframe the Fear

As an acting coach I like to share the viewpoint that fear is a liar. Fearful thoughts are not our thoughts.

Joe Dispenza’s teachings align with this understanding. He explains that fear often results from conditioned thinking—patterns ingrained by past experiences or societal influences.

In his book Becoming Supernatural, Dispenza emphasizes that fearful thoughts are low-frequency energies we can choose to tune out of. He highlights how fear traps us in survival mode, blocking our access to creativity and higher consciousness.

This perspective aligns with spiritual teachings that describe thoughts as external vibrations rather than inherent parts of us. We are like radios, capable of tuning into different frequencies. Fear is just one channel, and we can switch to another.

Recognizing this empowers us to question fear and align with more uplifting energies like courage and possibility.

Taking this into consideration can help us actors to reframe our performance anxiety thoughts. We can reframe them as lies. We can see them as external to us. We can choose not to tune into them and choose to tune into another frequency.

As Fritz Perls the father of Gestalt Therapy says, fear is excitement without breathing. So how about instead you try taking some long deep breaths and see if you can connect with the excitement and joy of acting instead. Let me know how it goes.

Your potential to shine on stage can be unlocked by addressing and reframing fear. Whether through techniques like identifying negative beliefs, tracing their origins, or sitting with your emotions, there are ways to step into your power. If you’re ready to take your acting to the next level, I’m here as your acting coach to guide you in overcoming these challenges and stepping into the spotlight with confidence.

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