No, you don’t always have to be “calm…”
Stress responses get a bad rap.
It’s understandable why, they’re exhausting! And uncomfortable. At their most extreme, they zap our energy, make us feel powerless or out of control, and disconnect us from one another, our creativity, and even from ourselves.
But the goal isn’t to never have stress responses!
The goal isn’t to always be relaxed and grounded all of the time.
Our stress responses are normal; they're there to protect us. They are also there to help us in certain situations. For example, during a performance, an audience member is disruptive and throws something at the stage. If the stage manager calls “Hold. Actors leave the stage asap,” it’s not the time to be super relaxed! This is an instance where that adrenaline, that stress response helps us to immediately leave the stage. It gets us to safety.
What is not so useful is if we still have that response when the threat is gone, say when we’re home or in a safe environment. If while we’re eating dinner with our loved ones, we are still responding as if that audience member is throwing something at us, it might not be helping us. This is a situation where our stress response could be hurting us. It could make us more irritable, snap at our loved ones, be unable to eat anything, and even keep us from getting a good night’s sleep.
And this is super common! For those of us who have a consistently intense level of stress, like actors and especially actors with marginalized identities, our stress responses are constantly being flipped “on.” And a lot of the time, they help us daily to navigate the difficult world that we live in. Unfortunately, the longer our stress responses stay “on,” the harder it can be to know when to turn them off or even how to turn them off. This is why many people with severe, chronic stress have difficulty relaxing, resting, and even feeling safe.
But again, the goal isn’t to never have stress responses!
The goal is to reclaim our energy.
When we’re able to discern when that stress response is helping or hurting us (and by how much), then we can start to take back our energy. When we reclaim that energy, even in tiny amounts, over time it enables us to create a lot of spaciousness and capacity in our lives. Capacity that we can then use to dedicate more energy to our craft, to bounce back faster from that bad audition, to connect more deeply with our loved ones, and even to sleep through the night. That capacity also helps us sustain and remain engaged in larger industry change work.
So if there was one thing that you could leave my workshops knowing more than anything else: no, you do not have to remain cool, calm, and collected all the time.