Lose Yourself

When the pressure rises, specific neural mechanisms hijack control and hand your performance to the wrong brain systems at the worst possible time. This is not a confidence issue or a talent gap. It is a neuroscience problem, and more practice will not fix it.

Lose Yourself is a six-week guided program that addresses this problem directly, built on the same protocols used in one-on-one performance neurology coaching with professional musicians and elite athletes. Most participants are musicians, but the mechanisms behind performance breakdown are not specific to music. If pressure degrades your performance in any setting, the neuroscience and the tools in this program apply.

What the program covers

The program is designed to help you systematically rewire how your brain responds to pressure. It moves through a deliberate six-week progression, starting with the neuroscience of why performance breaks down and building toward the ability to perform under pressure the way you do when the pressure is off. By the end you will have a personal protocol you can use for the rest of your life.

Format

6 weeks, delivered virtually. Weekly video modules provide the foundation and practical exercises. Three live group calls with Dr. Turknett give you direct access for Q&A and individualized guidance. A private community includes daily content and structured engagement, and Dr. Turknett is active inside the community for the duration of the program. Daily commitment is 20 to 30 minutes. Cohort limited to 25 participants.

About Dr. Turknett

Dr. Josh Turknett is a board-certified neurologist and the founder of the Institute for Performance Neurology. Performance neurology brings the same rigor and systematic approach required for the diagnosis and treatment of clinical neurological disorders to the problem of helping people get the most out of their brains. Dr. Turknett works individually with professional musicians, elite athletes, and high-level executives on the neuroscience of performing under pressure, and he applies the same clinical framework in this program.

He is also a lifelong musician who has dealt with performance anxiety personally and applied the same principles he teaches to his own performing life.

What you will learn

Lose Yourself is a six-week guided program built on clinical neuroscience. Here is what you will learn and why it matters.

• How your brain sabotages your performance under pressure, and the specific mechanism that causes the gap between what you can do in practice and what comes out when it matters — so that you stop blaming yourself for something that was never a character flaw.
• How to identify your personal failure pattern — so that every tool you use is targeted at what your brain is actually doing, not a generic one-size-fits-all approach.
• How to regulate your nervous system in minutes using the same breathing protocols used in clinical neuroscience — so that shaking hands, racing heart, and shallow breathing no longer dictate how you play.
• How to reinterpret the physical sensations of pressure as fuel rather than a sign that something is wrong — so that the racing heart before a jam becomes a readiness signal instead of a panic button.
• Why the Impostor is a slow, single-tasking processor trying to run a job that requires a genius-level parallel processing system, and how to use that against it — so that you learn to redirect it rather than fight it.
• How to anchor your attention on the music itself using a technique called Sonic Anchoring — so that the Impostor can't pull your focus to your fingers, the audience, or your own inner critic.
• How to build a personal pre-performance routine grounded in neuroscience, including an Activation Playlist that reconnects you with the confident version of yourself — so that you walk into every performance situation with a repeatable protocol that puts you in the right state.
• How to use graduated pressure exposure to rewire your brain's threat response — so that the situations that used to terrify you become progressively less activating over time, and the change is permanent.
• How to recover from mistakes mid-performance instead of spiraling — so that one wrong note stays one wrong note instead of derailing the rest of the set.
• How to design a personal ongoing protocol you can use for the rest of your life — so that the six weeks of the program is the beginning of a lasting transformation, not a temporary fix that fades when the program ends.

Every technique in the program is grounded in published neuroscience research and adapted specifically for musicians. This is not motivation. It is mechanism. And mechanisms can be retrained.