Flight or fight, you choose

By Grégory Demailly, Senior Product Manager, Buffet Crampon

This is the well-known expression used to describe the physiological process that kicks in when we face immediate danger: the body mobilises itself either to flee or to fight. Several scientific paradigms clashed at the end of the 18th century in an attempt to determine whether the trigger for this rapid hormonal cocktail came from the senses or from cognition (the brain, consciousness, the psyche) — William James, Carl Lange, then Walter Cannon.

And the symptoms are many: adrenaline speeds up heart rate and breathing in order to increase blood flow, delivering more oxygen (and nutrients) to the muscles and to the brain. The body instantly prepares itself to fight or to run. This emergency neurotransmitter also makes us more sensitive to light by dilating the pupils. The glucose reserve stored in the liver (glycogen) provides immediately available energy. Finally, all non-essential functions are temporarily shut down so that energy can be redirected to where it is most needed right now.

So here we are: the body is ready, the vigilance state is installed — cold sweaty hands, shallow breathing, fidgety fingers, “ADHD-like” focus, etc. But what can we do with this inherited adaptation when there is no actual physical danger, and when the only thing we care about in that moment is performing at our best?

Ladies and gentlemen, this is stage fright — or rather, one of its most widespread forms in people who are about to show something of themselves to others.

When you ask musicians, actors, speakers, or anyone who is about to present something of themselves to the gaze and/or the judgement of others, the words that come up most often are stress, fear and anxiety. And yet this feared triad is made of concepts that are actually very different. Does that mean that we confuse them? Certainly. But I also believe that each of us feels what is happening in a unique way — because we are the representative of the sum of our experiences.

Let’s take a closer look:

Stress

Before anything else, it is a normal biological adaptation mechanism, planned and even predictable (H. Selye, 1936). It is a life-saving state of vigilance aimed at maintaining or regaining balance, in response to a stressor, what we call homeostasis. According to the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, stress is defined differently:

“Stress occurs when there is an imbalance between a person’s perception of the demands of their environment and their perception of their resources to cope with those demands.”

Fear / Angoisse

Unlike stress, the source of angoisse is not external. It is not a deadline or a trigger in the environment. It is internal, latent, and lives within us. It is endogenous. It is like a fear without an object. It also induces a state of hyper-vigilance, uncomfortable to painful, physically and mentally.

Anxiety

It is more like a painful uneasiness caused by waiting, anticipation, or insecurity in the face of a more or less vague danger, a more or less defined threat. Ideas of duration and latency appear here: a state of being that may vary in intensity over time, but that remains present in everyday life.

We gradually see the composite portrait of the “culprit” emerging, made of a little bit of these three experiences. Among the artists I have met, those who say they don’t feel stage fright are often those who simply give it a different emotional label and a different colour. They use this “energy” as a catalyst, and for some even as a state of transcendence. They describe how “they work with it”, how they use it as fuel to heighten their concentration so they can once again give the best of themselves.

The others speak very little about it, if at all.

Today, methods to reduce the effects of stage fright are numerous, because the ways of feeling it are numerous too. It is a dynamic sensation, it lives within us, and it can reveal itself in many different forms.

It’s not a flaw to fix — it’s a skill to master.

* Merci à Roger Webster à qui j’emprunte ce titre “Fear or excitement ... almost the same... different results... you chose” : R. Webster, 2005. Preparation, practice, performance. p 114. Fentone Music