Imagine the worst audition you could ever experience. Picture a stifling, noisy, overcrowded waiting-room with a malfunctioning air conditioner, with you and dozens of other perspiring musicians waiting interminably before being called out to the stage—where matters grow even worse. You can’t find your violin. The sheet music is gone. The music stand keeps falling over. And once you finally start playing, the stage lights suddenly go out, plunging you into blackness at the precise moment that somebody drops a huge hunk of lumber onto the stage—right behind you—with a deafening crash.

Bad, huh? Enough to drive a person screaming out the door, or, at the very least, to cause a good, solid player to melt down mid-audition. Right? Actually, wrong, according to Dr. Don Greene, who believes that stress, when properly prepared for, can actually be good for a musician.

A trained sports and performance psychologist, Greene has for several years been developing specific coping methods for classical musicians—both students and professionals—who sometimes suffer from performance anxiety or who simply fall apart in high-stress situations. The trick, he says, is not to try to control or minimize the level of stress, but to welcome it, to count on it, and even—with a little practice—to make use of it.

“One of the biggest mistakes a performer makes is to assume that performance anxiety is abnormal, that it’s bad,” explains Greene. “It’s not good or bad—it’s just adrenaline.” In short: Stop fearing fear.

“The principle of sports psychology is overcompensation,” says Greene. “When practicing, you want to apply more pressure, more adversity than might happen in the actual game or performance. So then, when all that stress and pressure does happen, you can say, ‘Well, I’ve dealt with a lot worse than this. I can do this—no problem.’”

Here are a few tips for understanding—and using stress and anxiety to your advantage:

Train Your Brain
According to Greene, musicians who don’t do well under stress end up looking for solutions in technical things, energetically sharpening their musical skills while ignoring the actual problem. “If you can do a piece in a practice room—efficiently and well—then you have the technical abilities to do it,” he says. “But then if you go on stage and are not able to execute the piece, it’s not a technical issue. It’s a mental issue, an issue of how you deal with stress. A lot of people then will go back to the practice room to work on a problem that wasn’t there, namely their technique, when the problem wasn’t their technique—it was their response to stress.

The problem is not their bowing—it’s their bowing under pressure.”