C.A.L.M.: What Psychology Taught Me About Performing on Stage

By Special Guest Writer Eidee Tan

Why Practicing Isn’t Enough to Perform Under Pressure

I’ve practiced pieces until they felt effortless—until my fingers moved without thought and my bow knew exactly where to go. But the moment I stepped onstage, everything changed. My hand shook. My mind zoomed in on details I’d never thought about before. Suddenly I was trying to play instead of just playing.

For a long time, I thought this meant I wasn’t prepared enough. So I practiced more. And more. But the problem kept coming back, especially during auditions and performances that mattered most.

Eventually, I realized something unsettling: the issue wasn’t how much I practiced. It was how performance works.

Practice and Performance Are Not the Same Thing

In music education, we’re often taught that performance is simply the reward for good practice. If you repeat something enough, refine the mechanics, and eliminate mistakes, a solid performance should follow naturally.

But performance happens under completely different conditions.

Onstage, you can’t stop and fix things. You’re being evaluated. Your body is more alert. Your thoughts speed up. Your attention narrows. All of this changes how memory and motor control function. Skills that felt automatic in the practice room suddenly feel fragile.

When something goes wrong in this moment, it’s easy to assume the problem is confidence or nerves. But research in psychology suggests something more precise is happening: under pressure, we often interfere with our own skills.

The Paradox of Control

Highly trained performers are especially vulnerable to breakdowns under pressure. This seems counterintuitive—shouldn’t expertise protect us?

The problem is that expertise relies on automatic control. Over time, skills become procedural. We don’t think about every movement; we let the system run. But under evaluation, attention turns inward. We start monitoring what used to take care of itself.

Instead of trusting the process, we start controlling it.

That’s when performance fragments. Movements lose fluidity. Timing becomes inconsistent. The more we try to fix things in real time, the worse it gets. Effort increases, but control decreases.

This is why people often describe “choking” as feeling hyper-aware, not blank. You know too much in the wrong moment.

When Your Body Joins the Problem

For string players, this breakdown is often physical. Under stress, the body prepares for action. Heart rate increases. Muscles tense. Fine motor control becomes harder.

A shaking bow, for example, isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s a predictable physiological response. Stress increases muscle excitability, which amplifies natural tremor. When we feel that tremor, we often tense up to fight it—gripping harder, stiffening joints. But this only makes the instability worse.

It becomes a loop: tension causes shaking, shaking causes more tension.

Trying to suppress arousal entirely doesn’t work either. Performance requires energy. The question isn’t how to eliminate stress, but how to keep it from hijacking control.

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This article was originally published on TeenInk. CLICK HERE to read the full article!

About the Author: Eidee is a violinist and 11th-grade student in high school. A member of the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra (SYSO) since 7th grade, she has performed with the Seattle Chamber Music Society, Tacoma’s Second City Series, and on KING FM. She has furthered her studies at summer intensives in Austria and Philadelphia and recently led her school orchestra to a 3rd place finish at the 2024 ASTA National Orchestra Festival. Outside of music, Eidee is a portrait painter.