Stage fright

[Anders Lindman]

Have you noticed how celebrities always say that they need to have stage fright or at least some amount of performance anxiety or else they are not giving the audience their best, they tell the reporter.

That could be true. OR, it could be total bollox, just another mainstream propaganda scam in order to keep the sheeple in an emotionally retarded state; a regressed psychological state needed for their blunt manipulation techniques to work properly.

[jimijams]

Have you noticed how celebrities always say that they need to have stage fright or at least some amount of performance anxiety or else they are not giving the audience their best, they tell the reporter.

That could be true. OR, it could be total bollox, just another mainstream propaganda scam in order to keep the sheeple in an emotionally retarded state; a regressed psychological state needed for their blunt manipulation techniques to work properly.
This is true, although it is not really anxiety nor fright but rather a rush of energy or adrenalin that wakes you ready to be able to perform at your best..
Sometimes to much anxiety will work against you like a deer caught in the headlights, you've got to get it just right..

[jimijams]

That could be true. OR, it could be total bollox, just another mainstream propaganda scam in order to keep the sheeple in an emotionally retarded state; a regressed psychological state needed for their blunt manipulation techniques to work properly.
I'm not to sure of this second point, maybe you need to re phrase..

[Anders Lindman]

I'm not to sure of this second point, maybe you need to re phrase..

The second point is about an idea that popped into my mind. We have been taught by society - by parents, teachers, friends, mass media etc - to see performance anxiety as something natural, even as something needed for us to perform well. Then the question hit me: "Really? Isn't anxiety a sign of lack of personal control?"

When I can't control my own emotions, then I become an easy target for external manipulators to control them for me. Implanting the belief that people can't control their emotions, such as performance anxiety, and even reinforcing it by having celebrities confirming this belief, makes people vulnerable to external manipulators. The sheeple says: "Look, even this celebrity gets performance anxiety, so it must be natural and something cool then."

As Bruce Lipton said, having butterflies in your stomach simply means that your blood has been pushed away from the viscera to arms and legs as a fight-or-flight response. Such response is needed when chased by a cave lion for example, but mainstream propaganda experts have hijacked this reflex behaviour and are now using it for situations that rationally don't need such fight-or-flight response.

So when celebrities confirm that having performance anxiety is something natural, they may knowingly or unknowingly fuel the general assumption that not being able to control your emotions is good for you. I think that on the contrary, it's not good at all but rather a sign of lack of personal control.

[eternal_spirit]

Anders, people could imagine they are suffering from anxiety,by watching celebrities and identifying what they feel as the same as what the celebrity is feeling, therefore making the person focus thoughts on being anxious and making them even more anxious and so on.
Also performance anxiety is a sympton and appears in Medical books, in none medical terms this could be explained as someone being shy or nervous.
Maybe it's a confidence issue.

[stikmata]

I spend quite a bit of time in front of an audience... and i definitely get butterflies. Shit... i get butterflies right here just imagining it.... same type of feeling that i get when picturing standing in a ride for a roller coaster.... like, LET'S GO ALREADY!!!!! It's definitely fight/flight related... and it definitely involves adrenaline. I don't know how "natural" it is... but i've always had it... but it's never prevented me from getting A's in my public speaking courses or getting down for a crowd at a show... so *shrug*

[Anders Lindman]

Anders, people could imagine they are suffering from anxiety,by watching celebrities and identifying what they feel as the same as what the celebrity is feeling, therefore making the person focus thoughts on being anxious and making them even more anxious and so on.
Also performance anxiety is a sympton and appears in Medical books, in none medical terms this could be explained as someone being shy or nervous.
Maybe it's a confidence issue.

Yes! REAL confidence. Not the immature stuff of pretending to be confident. That's all too childish. Performance anxiety may serve a purpose when a deeper true confidence is lacking. So I'm not saying that performance anxiety is all bad, but from a more rational perspective, performance anxiety can, at least in theory, be replaced by true confidence.

I have strongly begun to suspect that developing true confidence is not primarily about fear, but about shame and guilt.

[Anders Lindman]

I spend quite a bit of time in front of an audience... and i definitely get butterflies. Shit... i get butterflies right here just imagining it.... same type of feeling that i get when picturing standing in a ride for a roller coaster.... like, LET'S GO ALREADY!!!!! It's definitely fight/flight related... and it definitely involves adrenaline. I don't know how "natural" it is... but i've always had it... but it's never prevented me from getting A's in my public speaking courses or getting down for a crowd at a show... so *shrug*

I think it's deffenetly natural. However, one ought to ask oneself whether it's possible to mature or not. Is remaining in a state of half-animal the only option? Or shall we begin to move in a more humane direction? A direction that includes the natural things and also allows for far greater control over one's own personal relationship with oneself and the rest of the world.