Blog By Knight
Dancing my Confidence Up

Too bad a I can’t do a double-blind study on the question as to whether or not Propranolol helps with Dance performance anxiety, because to tell you the truth I can’t really attest to its effectiveness yet even after two days (12 hours dancing) of the dance festival. I did really put my attention on the relationship between my feelings and my sweating symptoms.

What I noticed was that the classrooms and the ballroom were not at all hot or stuffy and I was fine most of the time until I was: a) feeling like I was not getting something right in a class, b) dancing with someone outside of my comfort range (someone from my “makes me anxious” category). Then I was not dripping wet but did notice that I all of a sudden was sweating more when I had not been minutes earlier.

I had several conversations with other dancers about this phenomenon and and two guys admitted to sweating heavily, but in their cases both excellent dancers and it was from exertion and heat rather than anxiety. They both dealt with this issue by bringing additional shirts to the dance as well as wearing a jacket when dancing so their follow did not have to embrace a wet, clammy tee shirt. in order to dance with them.

One of the teachers in a class on leading and following, actually referred to something teachers apparently call the “Intermediate Crisis” that dancers get at this stage of dancing where they feel like everything is breaking. Funny how knowing that other people are also messed up is comforting. I haven’t ruled out the use of Propranolol. I will try it some more but I also will put myself on a desensitization program like you would with an elevator phobia.

To treat a phobia, one would do relaxation exercises, and positive self-talk and then for example, ride the elevator one floor at a time, maybe with a coach or therapist, to help keep calm. If one does this enough times you train your autonomic nervous system to keep quiet and the symptoms will abate.

When I came home from Argentina, I had already decided to do some desensitization dancing to deal with this by getting some private dance lessons with Clint from Tango Evolution once he returned. This didn’t work out so well for me or for Clint. The thing is he fell down a flight of stairs when leaving his Buenos Aires apartment on his way to the airport and broke his ankle. Poor Clint was there all alone at that point since everyone else had already left, to come home. He had to fly home with his ankle the size of a basketball and is out of commission for dance lessons for at least six weeks.

Yesterday, when I felt like I was losing it in one of my classes, I danced with Julian, an Atlanta dancer I didn’t know very well, and my confidence was fully restored. I guess I just had a spate of not so good leads when we rotated in the class. But Julian was a master. He made it extremely easy and my anxiety completely calmed down. Julian worked much better than the Propranolol. The bottom line is that I have signed on with Julian for some private lessons to dance my confidence up.

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