Although often treated as a mental health issue, performance anxiety is autonomic. It is typically the result of the body shifting into a defensive physiological response (often flight or shutdown) under the pressures of performance (competition, public speaking, presenting to a group, etc.) that arises when someone's body begins to detect threat even if their cognition thinks they are safe.

Addressing performance anxiety involves learning to 1) more accurately track interoceptive (inward felt bodily) cues of threat, 2) learning to increase our access to connection resources and the felt sense of safety while we are performing, such that the neural inputs the body is receiving do not push it across a threshold into defense. We conceptualize this as understanding our own autonomic composition, and gaining greater autonomic fluency.