Strategies against burnout

Imagine the audience naked. Nervous debutants have often been given advice like this in music training when they are struggling with performance anxiety. It usually works. Today, however, the strategies for combating performance anxiety are much more differentiated. Most of them use the same tactics: using humor to take some of the emotional sting out of meaningful tasks and tensions. The Munich pianist and music psychologist Adina Mornell explained a whole range of such approaches at the SMM symposium, which this year was dedicated to the topic of "Stress and music-making" and was once again extremely well attended with almost 200 participants. Turning seemingly unsolvable, daunting tasks into solvable and enjoyable ones seemed to be the basic pattern. According to Mornell, unclear goals should be replaced by clear sub-goals. Excessive self-demands, on the other hand, could be broken by "self-handicaps": Practicing extra less than possible, for example, is suitable for being able to say to yourself after mistakes that you could have done better if only...

Horst Hildebrandt from the Swiss University Center for Music Physiology put common stage fright myths into perspective. In training and counseling prospective professional musicians, he says, it has been the experience at music universities that a great deal of what students initially experience as fateful performance anxieties can be dealt with by the vast majority of them using suitable self-management tools. Only very few of those seeking advice actually need personal coaching or even therapy. According to Hildebrandt, it is helpful to realize that most of the symptoms of stage fright - sweating, palpitations, narrowing of the horizon and so on - are completely normal reactions to being on public display. In evolutionary terms, the latter is seen as a dangerous situation and the body is mobilized accordingly. The aim is therefore not to make such reactions disappear, but to develop techniques to avoid being hindered by them.

Two workshops offered practical strategies to combat anxiety, stress and overwork. SMM President Martina Berchtold-Neumann demonstrated hypnosis techniques and sent her audience on an inner journey - for what felt like five minutes, but was in fact twenty. And psychotherapist Ines Schweizer addressed the fear of fear, i.e. the stage fright that makes it destructive in the first place. If you realize that performance anxiety manifests itself on numerous levels - thoughts, feelings and the body - it becomes possible to use it productively.

In an extremely humorous contribution, cardiologist Sebastian Kerber pointed out that the focus with regard to musicians' illnesses is almost exclusively on the skeleton and the nervous system. The cardiovascular system is neglected. Music is literally also a "matter of the heart": the diagnosis of blood pressure and cardiac arrhythmia is therefore also part of the overall health care of musicians. Preventive measures can also be defined in this respect.

Finally, Zurich psychologist Victor Candia pointed out that we learn many movement patterns without realizing it. Many virtuoso skills, such as maintaining balance when walking, do not provoke any mental stress. This is quite different in the case of music-making, which we have to learn consciously and which is therefore a source of mental tension, which in turn causes physical stress. The symposium was once again excellently organized by SMM founder Pia Bucher and, as usual, expertly moderated by Ticino doctor Adrian Sury.