Effects of Overthinking Your Performance
You're about to go on, the stage is set, you have the routine practiced, prepared, and mastered. You go on, lights glaring, the crowd goes silent. You stand there and begin, you know your act, yet for some reason, you question every move you make, "Did I do that right?, What's next? Will they like it?" That would be one example of overthinking your performance, overthinking something that you probably already know by heart.
Here's the low down, the effects of overthinking your performance.
1. You Waste Effort
Every motion you make, every conscious choice is an effort; it takes up brains space, it takes up energy. Overthinking how you will do is just wasting the energy you could have used to perform to your absolute best. Most performances are based on muscle memory which happens after repeating one task over and over again. If you went through that practice then why question your own abilities. It wastes the potential you could have had.
2. You'll Lose Confidence
Overthinking usually comes from asking too many questions. It makes you a perfectionist and you begin to see flaws in everything that you do even if what you did is actually quite nice. This perfection which you wish to meet is not possible if you keep questioning yourself for every little thing that you do. Eventually, if this is what happens, you will begin to lose touch, lose the drive and the confidence knowing that you will never be able to live up to the expectations that you yourself have set.
3. You'll Jinx Yourself
Ok this may sound odd, but yes I do believe in jinxes, but it is based on the law of attraction, think positive and positive things will happen to you, think negative and the opposite holds true. If you question your performance, if you are overthinking then aren't most of your thoughts negative? If that's the case then that may lead to something unforeseen happening that could ruin your performance.
4. You Won't Be At Your Best
With all the prior points raised, it is logical to expect that you won't be performing at your absolute best that you could have. That is because of losing out and getting your manual mind stepping all over the muscle memory that you previously built up, or maybe because you tripped out of nowhere, or maybe because you aren't confident enough to carry on. In the end, this is the result and is a major impact of overthinking.
5. Your Audience Will Notice
Your audience, or whoever is seeing you perform, is going to notice that your performance isn't at all what they expected of you. You may stumble, you may trip, you may stutter you may even completely forget what you were supposed to do. In the worst case imaginable, you stand there as everyone is watching and you just freeze... You are not the only person that will notice that you are overthinking, and that is one key thing to keep in mind.
Overthinking can be dangerous to any good performance; you end up doubting yourself and setting goals and expectations that are unattainable. You lose the skills you have trained so hard for because you manually take control instead of letting your muscle memory take over. Next time you perform, try to steel your nerves and go with the flow; you'll be performing at your best.
