David Juncos is a clinical psychologist, author, and performance coach who specialises in music performance anxiety. His treatment approach includes the use of acceptance and commitment therapy, and he has presented his research on this subject on an international scale. He is a faculty member at the Voice Study Centre and his book, Act for musicians, A guide for using acceptance and commitment training to enhance performance, overcome performance, anxiety, and improve wellbeing is available for purchase now.
KEY TAKEAWAYS

David is a musician at heart and it was a draw to bring that kind of work closer to what I was doing clinically. He naturally gravitated towards musicians and thought, how can I do more of this work as a psychologist. That’s how he got into working with performance anxiety.
There's so many different ways to treat music performance anxiety, and there's no truly evidence-based approach that is superior when compared to other methods in research trials. So the sky is essentially the limit for people to come up with a way that's going to be effective and research it.
There's obviously a lot of underrepresented people who are not shown in research studies as extensively. So just knowing how to apply research to the person in front of you as well as applying your own clinical expertise and judgement calls, when necessary, is key to David’s work.
When you have social anxiety you just have this fear of doing things in front of others, essentially and when you combine that fear with other symptoms that are highly distressing then you essentially have a disorder. The disorder is not just the presence of symptoms only, it's also the presence of symptoms plus distress over having symptoms.
David breaks it down in terms of categories when I'm training music teachers to be on the lookout for these types of symptoms. There are the physiological arousal symptoms, tachycardia, and shortness of breath. The second category is cognitive symptoms, so what your mind is doing when anxious. The third category is behavioural symptoms, and you've got two different types of behavioural symptoms when it comes to MPA. You've got avoidant or anxious behaviours. These are, not making eye contact, holding onto your sheet music as if it was like a safety blanket or positioning yourself further and further away from the audience.
Act as part of a newer mindfulness and acceptance wave of behavioural psychotherapies that have become popular in the last 20 or 30 years or so. These types of therapists say, you don't necessarily need to jump into your mind and change the content of your thoughts. Essentially, it teaches you to just cut down on efforts to get rid of thoughts you don't like and get rid of feelings you don't like, and just learn to coexist with them peacefully. Learn to create a neutral relationship with anxiety so that way you're not in this adversarial tug war role with you and your anxiety and your thoughts.

 
BEST MOMENTS
 
‘There was a lack of good methodological rigour in how these psychotherapies were being studied in the lab’
‘What your mind is doing when anxious is worrying about making a mistake and worrying about the implications and making it’
‘Being female unfortunately makes you more likely to have MPA’
 
EPISODE RESOURCES
 
BAST Training
 
Guest Website:

actformusicians.com
hptherapy.com
http://www.hptherapy.com/OurPsychotherapists.en.html#DavidJ

Social Media:

Research Gate: researchgate.net/profile/David-Juncos-2
Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-juncos-psy-d-b688a53b/

Relevant Links & Mentions:

Voice Study Centre: voicestudycentre.com
Singing Teachers Talk Podcast - Ep 76. Mental Health Training for Performing Arts Workers with Raffaella Covino: https://linktr.ee/basttraining?utm_source
Applause for Thought: applauseforthought.com
The work of Diana Kenny
The Psychology of Music Performance Anxiety by Diana Kenny
Mental Health First Aid England: https://mhfaengland.org/
Voice Geek Facebook Forum
Noa