Confidence & Performance · Hypnosis session

You Can Play It in Your Sleep. Then You Watch Yourself Do It.

Music performance anxiety has been studied for nearly forty years, and the numbers are not small: close to a third of the players in Australia’s full-time orchestras report using beta blockers for it. Not rare, then, and not a preparation problem. Something specific happens to a well-learned skill when its owner starts watching it work.

Stage Fright

Twenty-four minutes in Mark Tyrrell’s voice, the only session here he narrates, for a performer whose material is ready and whose trouble starts in the wings. No preview, so the refund carries it.

US$18.95

one-off · no subscription · about A$27

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What’s in the 24 minutes ↓

Chosen by Ernest McLeodClinical hypnotherapist. An Adelaide practice, seeing clients across Australia by video. Fourteen years in practice. About Ernest →

How common is this among people who do it for a living?

Common enough to have its own name and forty years of surveys behind it. Fernholz and colleagues gathered the prevalence work for Psychological Medicine in 2019 and put estimates of debilitating music performance anxiety in professionals between 16.5% and 60%. Take the bottom of that: one working professional in six, badly affected.

The Australian picture is unusually good, because somebody went and got it. The Sound Practice study surveyed 377 players from the country’s eight full-time orchestras, a 70% response rate, in Frontiers in Psychology in 2014. Asked to rate settings, they put auditions worst by a distance, averaging 8.44 out of ten. Asked the cause, 89% named pressure from themselves and 78% excessive arousal around a performance.

The commonest cause performers name is not the audience and not the conductor. It is the standard they hold themselves to.

What happens to a skill when somebody watches it?

Something counter-intuitive. Beilock, Carr, MacMahon and Starkes ran the clean version for the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied in 2002. Experienced golfers and footballers got two kinds of interference: an unrelated one, listen for a tone and report its pitch, and one that asked them to monitor the skill itself.

The unrelated task barely touched them. Monitoring their own execution made the experienced performers substantially worse. Novices showed the opposite.

That is what an audience does. It swings attention inward, onto a sequence that runs better when nobody inspects it. Golfers are not musicians, so hold the size loosely. The direction has been found closer to home: Duke, Cash and Allen had 16 music majors play a passage while attending to their fingers, the keys, the hammers, or the sound, for the Journal of Research in Music Education in 2011. Accuracy rose the further out the focus went.

Is some of this meant to be there?

Yes, and zero is the wrong target. A performance with no arousal in it is a rehearsal with an audience watching. What is not sound is the graph. The Yerkes-Dodson inverted U is everywhere in performance coaching, called a law. Yerkes and Dodson published it in 1908; their subjects were twelve Japanese dancing mice avoiding a black box by electric shock. Across three experiments the curve appeared in one, and only where the task was hard. Mark Corbett traced its passage into management folklore for the Journal of Managerial Psychology in 2015. Some arousal helps; nobody has drawn your curve.

What has been tested is what you call it once it arrives. Alison Wood Brooks ran a karaoke experiment for the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General in 2014, accuracy scored by voice-recognition software. Participants sang Don’t Stop Believin’ after saying aloud that they were anxious, that they were excited, or nothing. The excited group scored 80.52%, the silent group 69.27%, the anxious group 52.98%.

One laboratory task with a Journey song in it. But nobody was told to calm down. The arousal stayed; only the name on it changed.

What can you practise for nothing?

Four. The first has the evidence under it and nobody wants it, because it means performing imperfectly on purpose, in front of people.

1. Put cheap performances in the diary, and make them real ones

   Exposure works graded, repeated and live, and for a performer the graded part is the audience, not the material. Build the run: your kitchen with one friend in it, then four friends, then an aged care home, then an open mic where nobody paid, then something that sold tickets. Same programme, six before the one that counts.

   Then the rule people break. Take it all the way through, mistakes included, and do not stop. A performance abandoned halfway teaches your body that stopping is what rescues you.

2. Rehearse with your heart already going

   You practise at fifty-five beats a minute and perform at a hundred and ten, then find the hands unfamiliar. Close that gap: run up three flights, then start while the tremor is still there. Add the rest of the conditions — the clothes, the shoes you will stand in, the lights up, a phone recording, one take, no restarts.

   Being recorded is a mild version of being watched. Sport calls this pressure simulation; in music it is thinly tested, and I would do it anyway.

3. Give your attention a job outside your body

   This is the practical half of Duke’s pianists. Choose one anchor for the first thirty seconds, outside you: the sound off the far wall, the top of the phrase, the drummer’s left hand.

   Then rehearse the moving of attention, not only the passage: twenty repetitions, until sending it out there is automatic. Do not try to stop thinking about your hands; that has never worked for anybody.

4. Over-rehearse the entrance and the recovery, not the piece

   You have practised the piece. You have almost certainly never practised the walking on, which is the part you say is the problem. Drill it alone, fifty times across a fortnight: the wings, the walk, the bow, the settle, the breath, the first eight bars. Then stop.

   The second drill is recovery. Have somebody cough loudly, drop something, or make you fumble at a moment of their choosing, and keep going. A rehearsed performer’s disaster is almost never the wrong note. It is the two seconds afterwards.

Where do beta blockers actually sit?

They are ordinary here and largely unspoken, so here is the number. In that Australian survey, 31% of the 377 players reported taking beta blockers for performance anxiety. Across the three surveys that have asked directly — Fishbein and colleagues in Medical Problems of Performing Artists in 1988, Lockwood the year after, and the Australian data — the figure sits between 20% and 30%. Not rare, and not a character defect.

What they do is narrow. A beta blocker blunts the peripheral end — tremor, pounding, an unsteady hand — and does little to the frightened thinking or the avoidance, the half that rearranges a career. Performers add an objection the journals rarely record: some of the edge goes with the tremor.

In Australia they are prescription-only, so this is a GP conversation. I will not name a drug or a dose; that is not my job and not my registration. And the common version — a couple off a colleague in the pit, or a website — is a bad idea. They interact with asthma, some heart conditions, diabetes and other medicines, and your GP knows what else you take.

Does hypnosis do anything for performance anxiety?

Less than the field claims. Kinney, Saville, Heiderscheit and Himmerich reviewed every intervention tried on music performance anxiety for Behavioral Sciences in 2025: 40 studies, 1,365 participants. Two were hypnotherapy. Stanton randomised 40 music students in 1994 and reported reductions still present six months later. Brooker compared cognitive hypnotherapy with EMDR and an untreated control across 46 pianists in 2018; both cut state anxiety.

Two studies and eighty-six people. The review’s verdict on the field is that the evidence base remains in its infancy: small samples, few randomised designs, almost no follow-up. Nicholl and Abbott’s meta-analysis in Psychology of Music in 2025 pooled 16 randomised trials and found treatment beat control — a statement about therapy, not about a file on a phone.

Both trials put a practitioner in a room with a performer. Neither tested a recording, and nobody has. What is for sale below is the domestic version of that.

A recording, or a performance psychologist?

If you perform for a living — if auditions decide your year, if one bad night costs the next contract, if you have started letting the solos go — the right referral is a psychologist who works with performers. In Australia many sit under the sport and exercise psychology endorsement, because a violinist walking on and a shooter stepping to the line are the same problem.

So, the proportion. This is a nineteen US dollar recording, not treatment and not a coach. It works on arousal, generally, and cannot know what you play. If a livelihood is at risk, twenty-seven dollars is not the answer. Where it earns its place is beside the list above: the evenings before a concert, for someone who performs perfectly well and pays too much for it.

What is in the Stage Fright session?

Twenty-four minutes and nineteen seconds, and here is the variable to know first: this one is narrated by Mark Tyrrell, not Roger Elliott. Every other session here is Roger. If you got along with that voice, this is not the same purchase, and there is no free preview to check against.

A narrator you cannot settle with makes everything underneath irrelevant, and it is the commonest reason one of these fails for a particular person. With no sample, the refund does that job.

The session is permissive rather than commanding: no barked affirmations, nothing ordered. It works on the arousal you carry into the wings and the automatic film of it going wrong.

Who is this session wrong for?

Anyone whose difficulty is larger than the stage, and anyone hoping it replaces the cheap performances above.

• The same dread meets you in the green room, at a counter, on the phone.
• You have pulled out of a booking, or gone on unwell, more than once this year.
• You have stopped auditioning, or moved to the back of the section.
• A drink, or somebody else’s prescription, is part of how you get on.
• Your living depends on this and you have never spoken to a professional.
• You have had thoughts of harming yourself, or of not wanting to be here.

The first four belong with a GP or a psychologist rather than in a basket, and the first has a page of its own here. The fifth is not a health problem, just the wrong size of purchase. The last belongs with somebody today; numbers below.

Common questions about stage fright

Other sessions that may fit you better

• Public Speaking ConfidenceIf there is no material to hide behind and talking is the act
• Long Term Presentation AnxietyIf one dated event is eating the weeks before it
• Overcome Imposter SyndromeIf the fear is being found out rather than watched

If none of those is it, the confidence and performance guide sorts sessions by situation rather than label.

Whatever you decide about buying, put one cheap performance in the diary this month, a room where nobody paid to be there, and take it through without stopping.

Ernest McLeod — clinical hypnotherapist. An Adelaide practice, seeing clients across Australia by video. Fourteen years in practice.

• ICHP
• FELLOW, ASCH
• IICT MEMBER

Hypnotherapy is not a registered profession in Australia, so I am not AHPRA-registered and I am not a psychologist. Those three are the bodies I do answer to.

I also train other hypnotherapists. My smoking, gambling and vaping cessation courses have been reviewed by the Australian Hypnotherapists’ Association and approved for CPD points.

I am not a performer and would not presume to tell you anything about your instrument. What I can do is separate the parts with research behind them from the folklore with a graph. More →

This is a self-help audio session, not medical treatment, a diagnosis, or a substitute for professional care. Stage fright is not a medical condition, but if the same dread turns up in ordinary social situations, or you have been withdrawing from work, see a GP. Beta blockers are prescription medicines and belong with your doctor, not a colleague or a website. Never listen at the wheel.

Written by Ernest McLeod — clinical hypnotherapist. An Adelaide practice, seeing clients across Australia by video. Fourteen years in practice. Last updated 2026-08-20.