USU Student Researchers Look Into Best Practices for Dealing with Performance Anxiety

You may have felt it yourself before, whether in giving a presentation at work, a speech in public, or in performing on stage. In those moments– or just before– stress and anxiety can set in, and a worry if you’d be able to perform up to the audience’s standards, or just your own, or possibly both.

To try and figure out best practices for combating and dealing with those worries, a group of USU music students, while attending the Walled City Music International Piano Festival, wanted to look into how people deal with it themselves.

Through video data, surveys, and interviews of music faculty, judges, festival participants, and audience members, they complied data on how day-of practice time may help or hurt, how audiences perceive a performer’s anxiety, and what strategies could help in coping with anxiety and physical symptoms of anxiety, among other findings.

In this video, find out what the students takeaways were, and what they recommend to do for coping with this anxiety.