Page 109 - How to Shine on Stage

3

From Stress to Mental Well-Being

This chapter addresses the challenges faced by professional musicians 107
and/or the students of music to whom music is an important part of their
identity. This chapter examines the journey from the experiencing stress
to the experiencing mental well-being in professional musicians or those
training to become professional musicians.
First, we will define the stress related to the professional music ca-
reer, outlining its potential origins with regard to the phase of perfor-
mance (before, during, and after performance), and mental resilience
training as the most efficient strategy to regulate stress levels in musi-
cians. Next, we will focus on two concepts of pre- performance excite-
ment, namely performance anxiety and, in contrast, the performance
flow. It bears clarifying that performance anxiety is considered the most
common stressor in musicians, while flow is considered to be a predictor Profession of Performing Musician as a Source of Stress
of mental well-being. At the end of the chapter, we will also consider the
psychological well-being of musicians.

3.1 Profession of Performing Musician as a Source
of Stress
The music profession is frequently romanticized as a profession where
one can constantly pursue one’s passions. This idyllic surface image is
far from the truth, because although vocationally engaging in music is
a privilege and provides musicians with a real sense of psychological
well-being (Murko, 2016), it is also a major source of stress.
Theorell et al. (1990, in Gabrielsson, 2012) conducted a research
study which compared six occupational groups: physicists, aircraft me-
chanics, air traffic controllers, waiters, loading staff, and symphony mu-
sicians. They found that symphony musicians and loading staff have the
highest blood pressure at work and the lowest chance of co-determina-
tion at work. These results support the hypothesis that the combination
of high occupational demands and low co-determination chances may
have a negative impact on health. Most of the participating musicians
rated the opportunities to use their personal knowledge and skills in their
work as good, and although almost half of them experienced their work