(Disclaimer: Nothing I say here should be construed as speaking for NASA. These are strictly my personal thoughts. All technical information written here is in the public domain.)
In my job as a spacecraft engineer, most of my time is spent designing and testing the systems that control spacecraft pointing and propulsion. However, those of us who design the pointing system generally need to be on-hand for launching a new spacecraft and establishing a stable attitude. So, I have helped operate a couple of spacecraft in their first few months (the first was WMAP, and the most recent was SDO, the Solar Dynamics Observatory).
Leading up to launch, it is customary to do a lot of simulations, especially of potential failures. The simulations sometimes go badly, with things really getting screwed up. But practicing until everyone is bored with simulations seems a key to a successful launch team.
On the actual launch day, the adrenaline level is weird. You have taken all these actions before in sims, yet you know it’s quite likely to have no failures, but that it’s more important this time that you catch any failures early.
Frankly, I love it. It’s one of my favorite things about my job. Here are three things that I know have helped me be comfortable in high-tension situations:
I’m the oldest of three close brothers. We were a team so often as kids, with me the leader, that it feels natural to take control. (My friends in high school used to call me “O Imperious One” when I got too bossy.)
I played sports (badly) at an early age. Sport combines a need for quick reactions with physical exertion. By wearing myself out and still needing to perform, I think it helps me ignore the adrenaline. Then, I took that knowledge of my body’s responses to stress to other situations.
I have performed music in front of audiences since I was a little kid. In performances, something can always go wrong. You rehearse and rehearse, but you still keep in mind that you have to react to unexpected events. I’m a decent but not great singer. The one time I got a choral solo in college was my final year. I did fine in rehearsal, but in the performance, my voice cracked horribly on the first note (the song was the Russian “Kalinka”). getting the error out of the way early let me calm down and focus on performing like I rehearsed. By the end, I was doing great and got some really nice applause (audiences love a recovered failure even more than a perfect performance).
So, that’s my experience with what you’re talking about. Great post!
I’m interested by your mention of sports. Anxiety and stress activates the sympathetic nervous system, raising the heart rate, reducing bloodflow to the gastrointestinal tract, etc. Exercise has the same effects. I swam competitively as a teenager and I didn’t tend to notice feeling nervous DURING a race, possibly because the exhaustion of swimming masked the physiological stress reaction. Also, sports are one of the few areas where the sympathetic “fight-or-flight” reaction can serve its original evolutionary purpose. You want your heart rate to be up before a race, whereas that reaction is pretty useless before, say, a spacecraft launch.
Not being terribly good at sports, I tended to be very nervous leading up to a game. I frequently made mistakes that hurt my team (I only ever played team sports in any organized way), and I began to learn to fear making new mistakes. Then, once the game started and as it progressed, that anxiety changed depending on how much I was actually exercising and what skill I was showing (i.e. was I making us lose again, or was I actually being helpful?) And—here is the useful point for this discussion—I could observe during the game what effects my nerves were having. I could tell when I was getting too hung up on performing well and it was making me perform badly. I could tell when I was keeping the energy pumping enough and I was missing things. Not caring and caring too much about winning are the Scylla and Charybdis of sport. Sympathetic nervous system responses are the churning of the water, making you always have to adjust course.
You’re not exactly correct about wanting me wanting my heart rate low before a launch. I clearly don’t want to be bouncing off the walls, but I want a certain level of eustress (as opposed to distress) so that I can think quickly and clearly. That’s how I work best.
The only sport I was ever deeply involved in was competitive swimming, which is a) an individual and not a team sport, and b) ALWAYS involves the maximum physical effort for the duration of a race. The pre-race adrenaline rush seemed to help a lot of people to go faster, but not me; I was the same speed in competition as in practice. I did experience nervousness before a race, but more on a psychological than a physiological level. I would feel a sense of doom, but my heart rate wouldn’t go up much.
Interesting, what you’re saying about eustress/distress. I suppose maybe you need a certain level of sympathetic nervous system activation in order to be focused on outside events in real-time. This is what I noticed at a recent lifeguard team competition; I wasn’t nervous and I didn’t feel pressured to do well, and my performance fell drastically! Maybe next time I won’t be so irritated by the pre-competition butterflies, since apparently they serve a purpose.
The only sport I was ever deeply involved in was competitive swimming, which is a) an individual and not a team sport, and b) ALWAYS involves the maximum physical effort for the duration of a race.
Something doesn’t seem right there. People swim faster in a 200m race than they do in the first 200m of a 1500m race. They do not exert the same amount of physical effort during that time.
I guess that’s true… It was always less true for me because I was a distance swimmer with almost no capacity to sprint, so my first 200 split in an 800 or 1500 is quite close to my 200 time. There is some pacing involved, but you want to be just as tired after a 1500 as after a 100, so overall the race uses maximum effort.
In amateur choral singing and musicals, we often say that a smooth dress rehearsal is bad news, because you get a sense of complacent confidence. It makes it harder to focus, because you have to do so consciously. We prefer for things to be rough the night before the performance, because we all go to sleep a little nervous, our bodies and unconscious thoughts focusing our conscious minds on the things we need to get right that weren’t automatic in the rough rehearsal.
I imagine professionals have less of a problem with this, since they perform much more often, but I don’t know.
Our cognitive processes use energy and biochemicals that must be replenished with food and sleep. So, there’s no way the brain can be at 100% all the time. Anxiety, epitomized in the fight-or-flight response, allow us to call up full faculties for a short period of time whenever it’s needed.
That said, I’m 95% confident that we say it as a way of not letting ourselves be discouraged by rocky dress rehearsals, not because it’s actually true. After all, it’s not like we worry that our second-night performance will be sabotaged by a good opening night.
Hmm, I have certainly seen really excellent dress rehearsals followed by shabby opening nights. And if we do fantastically on the opening night, we often do a little less well (though still usually a good show) the next night. People get lax and allow themselves to be distracted by other things.
All that said, your experience is different, and I acknowledge that. I may be suffering from confirmation bias, but I don’t think so for the group I sing with. It may also be that, in theater, you are far more likely to be noticed if you make a mistake, whereas in choral music you can often be covered by the rest of your section.
Hmm, I have certainly seen really excellent dress rehearsals followed by shabby opening nights. And if we do fantastically on the opening night, we often do a little less well (though still usually a good show) the next night. People get lax and allow themselves to be distracted by other things.
Might this be regression to the mean? Following a particularly good performance, the majority of possible performances are not as good as the particularly good preceding performance. See also the Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx. (I vaguely recall reading about this quite some time ago from a source that went into more depth than the Wiki article, not sure where though.)
For activities like competitive sports or extemporaneous acting, I could see what you’re saying. But, I don’t think that the quality of different performances of a given show, in which the actions are the same each performance, would be scattered in a Gaussian or other randomized way. A performer generally expects only to improve on a particular show, as long as one applies oneself, as will have been happening during the rehearsal period leading up to the performances. If there is a reduction in performance quality on a given show, either the performers are not applying themselves with the same intensity (as I suggested), or there is some other explanation.
Now, if you compared performance quality across different shows and different seasons, you might see something more like a random scattering around a mean.
If there is a reduction in performance quality on a given show, either the performers are not applying themselves with the same intensity (as I suggested), or there is some other explanation.
Whatever factors, including intensitity of actors applying themselves, affect the quality of performance, themselves will have some distribution that can be mapped to a distribution of performance quality. If a particularly good performance occurs because all the actors had a good previous day, got good sleep the previous night, and applied themselves with full intensity, then the following performance is not likely to repeat that confluence of favorable factors and therefor is not likely to repeat the same quality of performance.
I can’t speak to professional theatre, but among amateurs in my experience average quality of performance may increase over time (though it’s hard to be sure over 6-9 performances), but that’s swamped by show-to-show variability. Some performances just “click” better than others.
Whether the variability is “randomized,” or a product of us not “applying ourselves” with the same intensity, or there is instead “some other explanation,” I don’t really know. It certainly feels like there are all kinds of contributing factors… the audience, the kind of day everyone has had, etc. … and one could measure those factors and look for correlations, and manipulate them to see what happens, but I’ve never seen any such results.
I expect that audience response is the single strongest correlate to variability in performance (once outliers like actors having heart attacks or sets catching fire are eliminated), but the causality there may be entirely in the other direction.
Beyond that, I’d guess sleep. (Which we can consider rolled into “applying oneself,” I suppose.)
(Disclaimer: Nothing I say here should be construed as speaking for NASA. These are strictly my personal thoughts. All technical information written here is in the public domain.)
In my job as a spacecraft engineer, most of my time is spent designing and testing the systems that control spacecraft pointing and propulsion. However, those of us who design the pointing system generally need to be on-hand for launching a new spacecraft and establishing a stable attitude. So, I have helped operate a couple of spacecraft in their first few months (the first was WMAP, and the most recent was SDO, the Solar Dynamics Observatory).
Leading up to launch, it is customary to do a lot of simulations, especially of potential failures. The simulations sometimes go badly, with things really getting screwed up. But practicing until everyone is bored with simulations seems a key to a successful launch team.
On the actual launch day, the adrenaline level is weird. You have taken all these actions before in sims, yet you know it’s quite likely to have no failures, but that it’s more important this time that you catch any failures early.
Frankly, I love it. It’s one of my favorite things about my job. Here are three things that I know have helped me be comfortable in high-tension situations:
I’m the oldest of three close brothers. We were a team so often as kids, with me the leader, that it feels natural to take control. (My friends in high school used to call me “O Imperious One” when I got too bossy.)
I played sports (badly) at an early age. Sport combines a need for quick reactions with physical exertion. By wearing myself out and still needing to perform, I think it helps me ignore the adrenaline. Then, I took that knowledge of my body’s responses to stress to other situations.
I have performed music in front of audiences since I was a little kid. In performances, something can always go wrong. You rehearse and rehearse, but you still keep in mind that you have to react to unexpected events. I’m a decent but not great singer. The one time I got a choral solo in college was my final year. I did fine in rehearsal, but in the performance, my voice cracked horribly on the first note (the song was the Russian “Kalinka”). getting the error out of the way early let me calm down and focus on performing like I rehearsed. By the end, I was doing great and got some really nice applause (audiences love a recovered failure even more than a perfect performance).
So, that’s my experience with what you’re talking about. Great post!
I’m interested by your mention of sports. Anxiety and stress activates the sympathetic nervous system, raising the heart rate, reducing bloodflow to the gastrointestinal tract, etc. Exercise has the same effects. I swam competitively as a teenager and I didn’t tend to notice feeling nervous DURING a race, possibly because the exhaustion of swimming masked the physiological stress reaction. Also, sports are one of the few areas where the sympathetic “fight-or-flight” reaction can serve its original evolutionary purpose. You want your heart rate to be up before a race, whereas that reaction is pretty useless before, say, a spacecraft launch.
Not being terribly good at sports, I tended to be very nervous leading up to a game. I frequently made mistakes that hurt my team (I only ever played team sports in any organized way), and I began to learn to fear making new mistakes. Then, once the game started and as it progressed, that anxiety changed depending on how much I was actually exercising and what skill I was showing (i.e. was I making us lose again, or was I actually being helpful?) And—here is the useful point for this discussion—I could observe during the game what effects my nerves were having. I could tell when I was getting too hung up on performing well and it was making me perform badly. I could tell when I was keeping the energy pumping enough and I was missing things. Not caring and caring too much about winning are the Scylla and Charybdis of sport. Sympathetic nervous system responses are the churning of the water, making you always have to adjust course.
You’re not exactly correct about wanting me wanting my heart rate low before a launch. I clearly don’t want to be bouncing off the walls, but I want a certain level of eustress (as opposed to distress) so that I can think quickly and clearly. That’s how I work best.
The only sport I was ever deeply involved in was competitive swimming, which is a) an individual and not a team sport, and b) ALWAYS involves the maximum physical effort for the duration of a race. The pre-race adrenaline rush seemed to help a lot of people to go faster, but not me; I was the same speed in competition as in practice. I did experience nervousness before a race, but more on a psychological than a physiological level. I would feel a sense of doom, but my heart rate wouldn’t go up much.
Interesting, what you’re saying about eustress/distress. I suppose maybe you need a certain level of sympathetic nervous system activation in order to be focused on outside events in real-time. This is what I noticed at a recent lifeguard team competition; I wasn’t nervous and I didn’t feel pressured to do well, and my performance fell drastically! Maybe next time I won’t be so irritated by the pre-competition butterflies, since apparently they serve a purpose.
Something doesn’t seem right there. People swim faster in a 200m race than they do in the first 200m of a 1500m race. They do not exert the same amount of physical effort during that time.
I guess that’s true… It was always less true for me because I was a distance swimmer with almost no capacity to sprint, so my first 200 split in an 800 or 1500 is quite close to my 200 time. There is some pacing involved, but you want to be just as tired after a 1500 as after a 100, so overall the race uses maximum effort.
In amateur choral singing and musicals, we often say that a smooth dress rehearsal is bad news, because you get a sense of complacent confidence. It makes it harder to focus, because you have to do so consciously. We prefer for things to be rough the night before the performance, because we all go to sleep a little nervous, our bodies and unconscious thoughts focusing our conscious minds on the things we need to get right that weren’t automatic in the rough rehearsal.
I imagine professionals have less of a problem with this, since they perform much more often, but I don’t know.
Our cognitive processes use energy and biochemicals that must be replenished with food and sleep. So, there’s no way the brain can be at 100% all the time. Anxiety, epitomized in the fight-or-flight response, allow us to call up full faculties for a short period of time whenever it’s needed.
We say this a lot in amateur theatre, too.
That said, I’m 95% confident that we say it as a way of not letting ourselves be discouraged by rocky dress rehearsals, not because it’s actually true. After all, it’s not like we worry that our second-night performance will be sabotaged by a good opening night.
Hmm, I have certainly seen really excellent dress rehearsals followed by shabby opening nights. And if we do fantastically on the opening night, we often do a little less well (though still usually a good show) the next night. People get lax and allow themselves to be distracted by other things.
All that said, your experience is different, and I acknowledge that. I may be suffering from confirmation bias, but I don’t think so for the group I sing with. It may also be that, in theater, you are far more likely to be noticed if you make a mistake, whereas in choral music you can often be covered by the rest of your section.
Might this be regression to the mean? Following a particularly good performance, the majority of possible performances are not as good as the particularly good preceding performance. See also the Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx. (I vaguely recall reading about this quite some time ago from a source that went into more depth than the Wiki article, not sure where though.)
For activities like competitive sports or extemporaneous acting, I could see what you’re saying. But, I don’t think that the quality of different performances of a given show, in which the actions are the same each performance, would be scattered in a Gaussian or other randomized way. A performer generally expects only to improve on a particular show, as long as one applies oneself, as will have been happening during the rehearsal period leading up to the performances. If there is a reduction in performance quality on a given show, either the performers are not applying themselves with the same intensity (as I suggested), or there is some other explanation.
Now, if you compared performance quality across different shows and different seasons, you might see something more like a random scattering around a mean.
Whatever factors, including intensitity of actors applying themselves, affect the quality of performance, themselves will have some distribution that can be mapped to a distribution of performance quality. If a particularly good performance occurs because all the actors had a good previous day, got good sleep the previous night, and applied themselves with full intensity, then the following performance is not likely to repeat that confluence of favorable factors and therefor is not likely to repeat the same quality of performance.
I can’t speak to professional theatre, but among amateurs in my experience average quality of performance may increase over time (though it’s hard to be sure over 6-9 performances), but that’s swamped by show-to-show variability. Some performances just “click” better than others.
Whether the variability is “randomized,” or a product of us not “applying ourselves” with the same intensity, or there is instead “some other explanation,” I don’t really know. It certainly feels like there are all kinds of contributing factors… the audience, the kind of day everyone has had, etc. … and one could measure those factors and look for correlations, and manipulate them to see what happens, but I’ve never seen any such results.
I expect that audience response is the single strongest correlate to variability in performance (once outliers like actors having heart attacks or sets catching fire are eliminated), but the causality there may be entirely in the other direction.
Beyond that, I’d guess sleep. (Which we can consider rolled into “applying oneself,” I suppose.)