- One of the questions that comes up a lot,
especially music is should I use beta blockers?
Everybody else is using beta blockers.
And it's the exact same question you get in pro sports.
Well everyone's using steroids and growth hormone
as sort of a necessary tool to make it these days.
Isn't it?
And my response tends to be the same
to folks in all those fields is,
well I don't have any training in pharmaceutical treatment.
However, oftentimes I see these drugs as crutches.
Essentially what will happen is
you experience anxiety you experienced nervousness
and you use an external agent
to try and tackle that.
To suppress that.
Well what are we doing in the process?
As we discussed a little earlier,
what comes with nervousness is the adrenaline
and the capacity for the mind to think at a new level
and that's all great stuff.
If we wanna be creative
and if we wanna push our physical performance
to the next level, we have to have that.
And beta blockers and steroids
and tobacco use in particular, what they do is
they suppress all those physiological responses.
And so, okay you might feel calm
and there goes the nervousness
but along with it goes to the ability
to perform at the higher level.
So what you've done is you've taken yourself
from I'm a performance state which with your body
has granted a new ability
and you've moved yourself back down into a practice state.
And if you really...
And I challenged performers all the time,
really think about your best performances ever.
And I mean be tough on yourself.
When were the best ones?
Were they in a performance environment
or they in practice in a room where no one was around?
And very rarely do I hear people talk
about their best performances coming in rehearsal.
Say well rehearsal, yeah
I play correctly and everything
but what's great about performing being a performer
and being on stage, it's moving an audience.
And that ability to move an audience
is actually suppressed with a lot of drugs.
Similarly in maybe a good way to understand this is
to make the analogy with professional baseball players.
Oftentimes I find performers are grappling
with issues within their own field,
and when they think of an analogy
from another other field or they hear
like I'll have an executive who will be talking
with a surgeon and they talk about the same issues
but because they use a different language,
it helps some light bulbs go off.
So for musicians, I explained what baseball players go
through with chewing tobacco.
You get nervous before going into big games.
Guys are throwing a hundred miles
an hour right at your head.
And what baseball players will often do is
they'll use tobacco because tobacco takes the edge off.
And a lot of baseball players have a big wad
of tobacco in there.
And so you go up to the plate
and you're nice and relaxed.
But guess what?
So is your reaction time.
To hit a hundred miles an hour,
you've gotta be very quick.
You've gotta have lightening reflexes.
Well tobacco will numb those reflexes.
And so any enhancements they've gained in performance
by being quote unquote "relaxed" they've lost
in their suppression of their physiological systems.
And so it's really a wash.
We test baseball players with tobacco without tobacco.
We don't see one as being a
performance enhancement agent one way or the other.
What we've done is the gains we get
in physiological arousal, we've lost because...
We're talking about a situation without tobacco
the gains with physiological arousal, we've lost
because psychologically we're telling ourselves
this arousal is bad and I can never hit this guy
and we're letting our mind wander
outside of our performance to all kinds
and we're three or four pitches into the future
or we're all the way at the end of the game.
Even though it's the first pitch of the game
our mind is at the end of the game.
That type of thinking has countered
the benefits of the arousal.
But we think it's the arousal.
So we take tobacco and now the arousal goes away
and the psychological anxiety goes away.
Well the benefits of having
that psychological anxiety going away has been lost
because now we have slow reaction time,
our eyes don't work as quick,
our brain can't process information as accurately
and therefore we make errors where our swing is slow
and it's really a wash.
So I can't say that the drugs one way
or another are an enhancing tool.
However, they will interfere with a lot
of our physiological systems that contribute
to us performing really well.