Understanding and Working with Performance Anxiety in Education

Abstract

Recently, so-called mental health issues were exposed at the Tokyo Olympics. Yet the term “performance anxiety” was not in vogue in the media as it had been in the past. The emphasis was now on mental health in clinical terms. Although I acknowledge the work in this area being done in clinical psychology, I am not including this approach but rather provide a complementary one rooted in philosophy. An interpretation of experiences working with anxiety rather than with mental health issues is also possible by considering psychological perspectives that are derived from phenomenology and existentialism. This interdisciplinary conceptualization contributes to the concept of performance anxiety by providing a more detailed theoretical account of individual subjective experience involving a relational perspective on the nature of both positive and negative anxiety and its metaphorical implications for creative performances, be they musical, athletic, or any kind of performance. Performance planning is ultimately an indeterminate activity associated with negative and positive anxiety over time, because such preparation cannot predict the exact nature of a performer’s emergent, indeterminate self during any performance. Yet this “unfixed” emergent self is also connected to the preparatory self in that it is the self that also prepares the performance and is (hopefully) successfully blended into an emergent and thus indeterminate self. It can emerge as an earned attribute of positive anxiety and receptivity to risk-taking creativity and new understandings of anxiety based on experience and self.