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Sorry for the confusion in paragraph 3. My initial thought from your first post was that the challenges were primarily centered around physical tension. And that when your hands/shoulders/etc. get tight in performance, this ends up being a distraction mentally. So physical tension–>loss of focus.
But as I read more of your posts, I started wondering if the bigger issue was that when nerves kick in, your thoughts go blank or to worries or to monitoring your physical tension, which not only distracts you from the music and sabotages your focus, but which makes the nerves even worse, which then disrupts your thoughts even more which then leads to even more of an escalation in nerves, etc. So rather than focusing primarily on reducing tension, I wondered if it might be more useful to work on focus, in the sense that if you can train yourself to be intently focused on what’s task-relevant, you won’t have much brainpower available to worry about tension, nerves, etc.
Hope that helps to clarify!
Noa
