Why do we get stage fright?

THAT'S THE WHY:It's the stuff of nightmares: you walk out on stage and gawp like a fish as you forget your lines. You step up to take the pivotal free kick and it goes metres wide. The boss asks you to break down crucial figures in a meeting and suddenly you can't add two and two.

Why do we experience stage fright or performance anxiety? A new book, Choke, puts it down to “logjams” of information in the brain.

Author and psychologist Dr Sian Beilock of the University of Chicago describes this choking as “a performance that is inferior to what you can do and have done in the past, and occurs when you feel pressure to get everything right”.

You may fluff a well-rehearsed task by trying to control it too much (“paralysis by analysis”), and pressured situations can also affect the brain’s working memory, again impairing performance.

Beilock argues that engaging in a distraction technique can help avoid the freeze or flub. “If the tasks are automatic and you have done them a thousand times in the past, a mild distraction such as whistling can help them run off more smoothly under pressure,” she says.

In a Scientific American article from 2006, Marion Sonnenmoser adds that writing down perceived fears about an impending performance and “replacing them with favourable notions” can help.

And if giving a presentation, prepare.

“Study the content until you know it cold, write out the entire presentation, rehearse it alone and in front of a few volunteers until you could give it in your sleep,” writes Sonnenmoser. “Then perhaps the actual event won’t seem so foreboding.”