What is performance anxiety? Performance anxiety often comes up when you literally have to perform—when you’re acting, singing, or giving a presentation. But you can also experience performance anxiety in many everyday situations, from having sex to having to write a term paper.Performance anxiety causes you to worry that you’re going to fail. You’re going to forget your lines or the words of the song, or you’re going to freeze when someone asks you a question. You’re going to disappoint your partner or not finish your paper on time. Even if you’ve done these things successfully many times, even if you’ve rehearsed, you’re convinced that this time, you’re going to fail.What causes performance anxiety?I think there are two major causes. One of them, the fear of failure, is a pretty obvious cause. The less obvious cause is fear of success. People often think that fear of success doesn’t really exist, that it’s a kind of excuse for procrastination or other forms of avoidance. In fact, I think it’s quite prevalent. Since it often accompanies fear of failure, people tend to disregard it, but often the fear of success is what’s really holding you back.What are the fears associated with doing well? Usually, the fear of doing well is related to some pattern of relationships in your family. If your mother was unsuccessful in her profession, you might believe that being professionally successful yourself will hurt her in some way. On the other hand, if you had a father who was constantly giving you the message that you could never be as successful as he was, being successful might mean challenging your father’s view of who you are, and giving up your identity as the family failure. This may sound nonsensical to you at first. Who would choose to be a failure? But it can be very hard to give up an identity that you developed in order to please a parent. It can feel like you’re going to destroy your relationship with that parent, and destroy your own identity. In some ways, it’s similar to giving up an addiction. You may no longer be deriving pleasure from your substance of choice; it may be ruining your life, but thinking about becoming someone else can feel like jumping into the abyss.In therapy, how would you work through that? Fear of success is generally not a conscious fear. It can take awhile to get to it in therapy, and of course, not everyone who has performance anxiety has a fear of success. When fear of success is an issue, understanding and resolving that issue is usually what helps you to overcome your performance anxiety, and take pleasure in what you’re doing.In therapy, the first thing we need to do is understand the fears that are eroding your self-confidence. Then we need to understand the roots of those fears. When did they begin? What was going on in your life at that time? The answers to these questions are often not obvious, and it takes some exploration to uncover them. We’re not looking for your secret flaws or for hidden events in your past. Usually, the relational patterns that erode self-confidence are right there on the surface but you don’t recognize their importance. You think that there must be something wrong with you, and that if you find it and fix it, you’ll get over your anxiety. If you’ve wanted to be an actor your whole life, and you keep sleeping through your alarm and missing auditions, you think that the only reasonable conclusion is that there must be something wrong with you. If you’re trying to get into graduate school, and you keep partying instead of writing your papers, you blame yourself for your laziness and stupidity.Once you start to see that your fears make sense, you’ll begin to feel that a tremendous burden has been lifted. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not lazy or stupid. You’ve come by your performance anxiety honestly. Once you see how your anxiety is related to early family patterns, you can have more confidence in yourself, and your ability to succeed in the world. Your success probably isn’t going to hurt your mother, even if she imagines it will. And, even if it does, that can’t be a reason to continue to harm yourself. Continuing to be the family failure isn’t going to make your father feel better. It’s only going to make you feel worse. The more you can understand the sources of your fears, the more your performance anxiety will fade away, and you can enjoy doing the things that previously made you afraid. Click to learn more about anxiety therapy and treatment with Dr. Jane Rubin.