Anxiety as signal: a practitioner framework for reframing music performance anxiety

Music performance anxiety (MPA) is among the most prevalent challenges faced by musicians across training and professional contexts. Prevailing clinical and pedagogical approaches frame MPA primarily as a dysfunction that needs to be reduced, producing interventions that often target symptom suppression rather than the underlying cognitive appraisal processes that generate the meaning of anxiety. This perspective article proposes an alternative framework: the physiological activation accompanying high-stakes performance constitutes adaptive signaling, not pathological malfunction, and durable performance gains accrue not from reducing arousal but from reappraising its meaning. Drawing on autonomic nervous system science, cognitive appraisal theory, and two decades of practice spanning concert piano performance and clinical psychology, the author describes the Goodman Method®-a practitioner-applicable framework comprising four evidence-grounded techniques: arousal reappraisal, curiosity-based attentional redirection, coherent breathing for parasympathetic activation, and performance meaning reconstruction. The framework is positioned explicitly in relation to existing centering and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy approaches, with which it shares substantial conceptual similarities. Implications for music educators, performance coaches, and clinicians treating MPA are discussed.