There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from fighting your own nervous system before you’ve even walked into the audition room. Most actors’ instinct is to try to eliminate their nerves altogether — wishing them away, willing them into silence. But there’s a paradox at the heart of this: the harder you fight audition anxiety, the more of your attention it takes up.
The paradox at the heart of audition anxiety
In my latest piece for Spotlight, I dig into why “just relax” and “be confident” don’t work as advice — and what happens in the brain and body when we shift from controlling our nerves to accepting them. It’s a small shift in language, but it changes everything about how much of yourself is actually available in the room.
This is something I return to often in my work with actors — that the more energy you spend trying to master your audition nerves, the less you have left for the audition itself. It’s the same dynamic I’ve written about before in The Illusion of Control: the belief that controlling the outcome, or controlling how you feel, will make you safer. It rarely does. What tends to help far more is understanding your own audition mindset — recognising the pattern for what it is, rather than trying to override it by force.
In the Spotlight article, I explore the difference between focus and acceptance, why your anxious thoughts are predictions rather than facts, and a few practical ways to bring your attention back into your body when the spiral starts.
Read the full article on Spotlight
Since writing it, I’ve been thinking more about how this same control paradox shows up off-stage too — in relationships, in work, in how we treat our own bodies. More on that soon.
