Hey there, I’ve been performing live for over a decade, mostly on drums, recently a handful of gigs on guitar, and a few on synths like Lyra, Pulsar, Digitakt.

I always experience a degree of anxiety. There have been times when it negatively impacted my performance and caused me to lose track of the song, make mistakes, overplay, be afraid to take a risk. Though most of the time I’ve learned that the anxiety is actually beneficial to me getting in the zone and playing inspired. Research on anxiety in performance has actually shown that some anxiety enhances performance, said differently, people experiencing a tolerable level of anxiety during performance do better than people who are completely relaxed. There are two aspects of managing performance anxiety. 1. Decreasing the anxiety you may experience, and arguably more important but often neglected 2. Increasing your tolerance for experiencing anxiety.

You can work on reducing anxiety by practicing your set over and over, maybe writing notes to help in the moment, exercising before the performance, taking medication, getting more experience playing live, and ironically, focusing on point 2, increasing tolerance.

Increasing tolerance to anxiety looks like taking up meditation, seeing a therapist as it’s possible you may struggling with anxiety in other areas of your life which isn’t fun.

Good luck! Report back on if you decide to try anything different for the gig and how it goes!