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Anxiety

Why do you perform?

November 11, 2019 by Kevin Miescke Leave a Comment

Last weekend I finished up a wonderful performance experience with the Reno Modern Brass. There were many enjoyable moments, but there were also moments when I felt anxiousness and even trepidation at the upcoming concert. Generally I was very excited to share the new music we had prepared with our growing audience. There are things that can inspire us to perform: opportunities for professional growth, money, or an unexpected day off. While these are all rational reasons to share one’s music, a recent book I’ve been reading has me thinking about how our inspirations might influence the quality of our eventual performance. 

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book, Flow explores his extensive research into high levels of performance in everything from housekeeping to olympic swimming. Flow can be described as the perfect balance between challenge and capability that encourages intense, sustained engagement in an activity, usually resulting in a heightened sense of enjoyment and satisfaction. One of the key elements of establishing flow (or being in “the zone” as many call it) is having a strong sense of intrinsic motivation. 

Csikszentmihalyi argues that what drives us to keep growing as musicians and our reasons for performing cannot be based on external factors, if our goal is to achieve flow on a regular basis. Simply put, if you are pushing yourself to get better solely to earn accolades from your listeners or strictly for professional gain, you will rarely achieve a flow state. 

It is a valuable exercise to think about what truly motivates you as a musician. Find a few minutes each day for the next week to write down your thoughts on this subject. Often the best times for journalling and reflection are first thing in the morning, or before going to bed at night. Another good option is to take some time before your practice session to get some thoughts down. This can help start your practicing off on a positive trend, and remind you why you are spending your time studying and practice music. 

I will be diligently recording my ideas this week about my inspirations for practice, and will share some more thoughts on this subject next week. I wish you an inspirational week of music making! 

Works cited

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.

Filed Under: Anxiety, Performance

Resilience

October 7, 2019 by Kevin Miescke Leave a Comment

Practicing mindfulness won’t prevent bad things from happening to you. Sorry, but dealing with bad situations is part of life. What mindfulness can offer is a way to strengthen your resilience when dealing with life’s ups and downs.

It is important to remember that we all face setbacks and failures from time to time. It is easy to feel isolated when faced with these situations, but even the most successful person you can bring to mind has dealt with problems.

As musicians we deal with rejection and failure on a consistent basis, so it is easy to imagine how important a strong sense of resilience can be. If you have ever taken a professional audition of any kind, you have an intimate understanding of the benefits of resilience. Without it, we would give up at the first rejection from an orchestra, festival, or college job. You might think building resilience is a difficult task, but mindfulness training can help. 

A common instruction in mindfulness meditation is to offer space for the sensations and emotion you feel while meditating, without labeling them as good or bad. We need room to observe an emotion before dealing with it, or as the meditation teacher George Mumford describes it, allowing space between the “stimulus and the response.” This approach is exactly what we need to be resilient in the face of life’s struggles. 

When we allows thoughts and emotions to arise during a mediation without forcing them away, we are increasing our ability for resilience. A common experience in meditation is seeing a thought or emotion arise in the mind, and if allowed to, dissipate just as quickly. This only happens if the mind state is one of spaciousness and curiosity. If you observe your reactions to a bad situation in a similar way, you can choose the most helpful response for that moment. But this ability will not be available if the skill has not been developed in “the laboratory” of mindful meditation practices. 

In her article on resilience for Mindful, Linda Graham describes the outcome when we have access to this kind of response. 

“When the self-regulating capacity of your brain is functioning well, you can inhabit or quickly recover a felt sense of centeredness, ease, and well-being after an upsetting event. You regain your equilibrium. From there you can perceive clearly what’s triggering your emotions and discern what a wise response to those triggers would be.” 

This kind of intentional, thoughtful response to life’s stresses is available to all of us. Honing the ability to allow space for our everyday emotional reactions gives us the ability to better deal with the big stuff when it comes along. 

There are lots of great guided meditations out there about dealing with difficult or intense emotions. One of my favorite teachers on this topic is Sharon Salzberg, and she has a free meditation on difficult emotions you can find here. Give this a try this week and see if you can start to change your relationship to the emotions you feel. 


Works Cited

Graham, Linda. “Train Your Brain to Build Resilience.” Mindful, September 15, 2009. https://www.mindful.org/train-your-brain-to-build-resilience/

Filed Under: Anxiety, Emotions, Reactions, Stress

Stop Fighting Your Stress

July 15, 2019 by Kevin Miescke Leave a Comment

I am writing this in Bloomington, IN after an amazing week at the Mindfulness-Based Wellness and Pedagogy workshop with Frank Diaz, finishing up my certification. Throughout the week we enjoyed many excellent articles and videos, but one really stood out to me. It was called, “How to make stress your friend” and was presented at TEDGlobal 2013 by Kelly McGonigal. 

The argument she makes with a myriad of data and supporting research, is simply that stress is not the issue, it is our response to stress that causes the real problems. We are programed to believe that stress is bad, but our body’s natural responses to stress are designed to help us survive intense situations. McGonigal suggests that our stress responses can actually help us in the way they were intended to, if we change the way we view them. 

I think most of us can recall a moment when we were heading toward a stress-inducing situation: a big solo in an orchestra, a difficult exam, or an important presentation at work. If you recall one of these situations, you might even start to feel some of the physiological responses that typically arise, such as increased heart rate, perspiration, and even feelings of wanting to run away. My typical response to this used to be to try and push the feelings of stress or nervousness away, forcing them into the background. But this never really helped. 

Something Frank Diaz suggested this week at the WBMP workshop was instead of trying to fight with difficult emotions, just dance with them. Let them be and examine them with curiosity, letting the feelings of fear or stress be as they are. If you can learn to dance with your stress, the sensations naturally become less intense and you can redirect attention to the task at hand. 

This approach has been extremely powerful for me in the last year. I don’t always succeed, but my overall relationship with stress has become less overwhelming and much more congenial. So next time the feelings of stress start to arise in you, take a step back to look more fully at them, and see if simply letting them be offers a more helpful outcome. 

Filed Under: Anxiety, Awareness, Research, Stress

Exploring your relationship with performance anxiety

April 26, 2019 by Kevin Miescke Leave a Comment

If you asked most people,  “How’s your relationship with your performance anxiety?”, you would not expect a positive answer. We often see our P.A. (performance anxiety) as a combatant that we need to force away in order to perform well. 

Peter Lin and colleagues (2008) organized a study to measure the effects of zen meditation on anxiety and musical performance quality. They recruited interested music students from the Manhattan School of Music, the Teachers College Columbia University, and Mannes College of Music in New York, and set out to study the effects of meditation over an eight-week period. 

But what if we could change our relationship with performance anxiety, so that we didn’t feel like it was a battle for supremacy? Wouldn’t it feel so much better if we weren’t in a constant battle with a part of ourselves?

All of the students performed in a public concert before the study began, and again after the eight weeks. Their musical performance anxiety was measure after the performance, and their quality of performance was measure during the concert by designated judges in the audience. The group that was One group of students were taught meditation techniques, and were instructed to practice different forms of meditation for twenty minutes a day on their own. They additionally met for an hour a week as a group for guided meditation sessions. At the same time, the control group got no meditation training. After all of that, here is what the researchers found. 

You might expect that the meditation group experienced less anxiety during the final performance, right? You would be wrong. They reported feeling more their anxiety more vividly after regular meditation. 

As you might guess, this went against the original hypothesis of the researchers, which hoped to see reduced anxiety after the meditation training. But what was exciting was that the overall performance quality went up, as well as a change in the way the participants related to their anxiety. 

In the non-meditating control group, the sensations of anxiety resulted in adverse psychological reactions such as, “I feel my heart pounding which means I am not going to play well.” The meditators, however were able to accept the resulting physical manifestations of anxiety without adding the psychological reaction, and were ultimately able to “channel the elevated state of arousal to a more focused attention on the complicated task at hand – the performance” (Lin, 2008). 

So what does all this mean? 

When committing to a regular meditation practice, part of what you are learning is how to gently direct attention on mental and physical states without becoming attached to the emotions or feelings one might experience. Through this training, the musical meditators were able to observe their anxiety from a distance, having the experience of “I am noticing anxiety,” rather than, “I am anxious.” This might seem like a small difference, but as supported by this and many other studies, this change can make a huge difference in our relationship with performance anxiety. 


Lin, P., Chang, J., Zemon, V., & Midlarsky, E. (2008). Silent illumination: a study of Chan (Zen) meditation, anxiety, and musical performance quality. Psychology of Music, 36(2), 139-155.

Filed Under: Anxiety, Attention, College Musicians, Performance, Research, Uncategorized