@twocats thank you for sharing your experience. I’m glad you feel like it’s helping. As far as I understand it, this kind of usage (only taking it before a perfomance) is quite common, and not medically harmful, so IMO you should do what you feel works for you.
twocats a woman came up to me and said I don't need beta blockers. She used to take them and she had run out and was filled with anxiety before performing. Someone said "here, take this, it'll help" and she did, and felt herself calm down right away. Well, it turns out that she was given a placebo, children's Tylenol! She realized it was all in her head and now she uses meditation techniques to calm down.
I wasn’t there so I don’t know “how” she said this to you, but I hope it wasn’t as blunt as it sounds! It’s one thing to offer suggestions, but I think it’s unkind for people to automatically assume that what works for them will work for someone else.
As for nerves being “all in one’s head,” I never thought this was a helpful way to think about it. For one thing, a lot of the time, this can feel like blame, like “what’s wrong with you, it’s all in your head,” as if that should just let the person magically snap out of it.
Certainly it starts (or appears to start) in the head, but it quickly becomes a physical reality, because it’s the fight or flight response, which includes that surge of adrenaline, the pounding heart, the body temperature changes people often experience (e.g., breaking out in a cold sweat, feeling cold or hot) etc. etc.
Beta blockers work because they impact this physical response. If that woman was able to do something similar with meditation, good for her. But not everyone can do that.
BTW, the thing you (twocats) and I have talked about before, of doing some physical exercise on the day of a performance, also aims to impact that physical response.
The placebo effect the woman experienced also impacted that physical response. (I love reading research on the placebo effect, I’ve long thought how amazing it would be if there was a way to harness that and reliably control it!)
I have been trying to escape/overcome the physical effects of performance anxiety for years. And I’m definitely getting better. But IMO, just saying “it’s all in your head” is not helpful, because it overlooks just how powerful the mind-body connection is.
Especially when we see that the way to counter the “all in your head” nerves is often through the body (whether that’s beta-blockers or aerobic exercise or something else). To me, that right there contradicts the simplified explanation that “it’s all in our heads.” It is, in fact, all throughout our bodies.