How to protect your mental health in acting training.
So — first I guess I want to write a little disclaimer:
- I have not attended a 3 year drama school Acting course but I did a one year acting intensive (and when I say intensive I mean 7 days a week with an average day length of around 10 hours when an easy day looked like an hour of hardcore physical training in the morning and then a 2 hour monologue session in the evening) which was using training from one of the biggest drama schools in the U.K as well as having done a years part time acting program at one of the most well known and biggest drama schools in the U.K so I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on this subject despite the fact I don’t have a BA in Acting
- of course this is just my experience and I guess this is a guide I wish I’d been given on day one — I suppose I am writing this for other people as I feel this just isn’t talked about enough (if at all) as well as a reminder to myself
- every drama school is different and every teacher is different and I don’t claim every element is universal.
1. Remember that acting is not therapy
Lots of the time acting training, and just the experience of being in a play, can feel like therapy but it’s not. And it shouldn’t be used in this way.
Firstly, acting teachers are not qualified therapists, as much as they might like to fantasise that they are. They have absolutely no right to ask you about your traumas and absolutely no right to convince you that digging into those traumas is good for your acting or for yourself. No therapist would ever make you come in every day and talk about distressing personal truths in front of an audience — why? because research shows this doesn’t help you recover it just mentally exhausts you and can easily cause further damage. If you go on stage as Hamlet and sob genuinely uncontrollably because of how deeply you relate then you are not acting, you are having a breakdown on stage. There’s a difference. Maybe you can do this for the 2 showings at the end of first year but you could never sustain this 8 shows a week for a year. You’d either have a nervous breakdown or run out of tears — it’s unhealthy and unsustainable (and probably uncomfortable and boring to watch…).
It’s important to realise also that if acting is the only thing that makes you truly happy, maybe you need some real therapy. It can be seen as a badge of honour to only have acting in your life and nothing else matters, but how can you ever be happy in the quiet periods of your career when you’re not working if you’re only happy when you have a job (which will be most of the time). Again, that’s not sustainable.
2. Set your boundaries and don’t be guilted out of them
It is okay to not want to kiss someone in a class.
It is okay to not want to be picked up and thrown about.
It is okay to not want to take your clothes off.
It is okay to not be comfortable with the content of certain scripts.
It is okay to not be comfortable wearing a certain costume.
You are training, you are not in the industry yet and we all have our reasons for our yes’s and no’s. Any teacher who doesn’t respect that doesn’t respect you. So why respect them? If they roll their eyes or say something like “well it would be better if you could do ___, but fine.” smile and say you’d prefer to do what you want. Do not apologise. You don’t owe someone an apology for deciding what you want to do with your body. This also goes for other students — people do not have full licence to touch you just because you act with them, you have a right to decide when and how you want to be touched.
3. Only you know your body
I suffer from constant physical pain due to a variety of joint issues I have had since the age of around 13; these are manageable but have involved me taking a lot of painkillers and doing daily stretches in the past to deal with them. At drama school I was repeatedly told that my physical issues were “in my head” and something I could overcome if I put my mind to it, while on the other hand being told by other teachers to respect my body and listen to its limits. Because my issues flared up in certain contexts and not in others (for example most of my issues are to do with my ankles and are perfectly fine until I have to be barefoot) I was flat out told I was lying and that I was “wasting my training”.
I was so desperate to be liked and valued by my teachers that I pushed through pain that was not healthy at all, sometimes going home and crying from pain and frustration. The fact is that there’s pain you can ‘push through’ like the sting of lactic acid working in your muscles which is perfectly healthy and then there’s pain you shouldn’t ignore — only you know whats going on in your body and far too many directors/teachers in drama schools think they know better than you about your body — they don’t. Never compromise your physical wellbeing for the approval of some failed-actor-turned-teacher who you never have to see again in a few years. After all, you’re paying them to do their job and their job is not to cause you physical pain.
4. You never need anyone to tell you you’re a good actor
Lady Gaga’s famous quote “if theres a room with 100 people and 99 people don’t believe in you, you only need one to believe in you and you can do it” is bullshit. You have to be that one person for yourself. I have auditioned from drama school for 4 years now and not got in. I know I can act. I recognise where I need work and I don’t by any means feel like I’m as good as I can be but I know I can act. If you look to drama schools to tell you you’re good so that you’re able to love yourself you will a) compromise your mental and physical health to get their approval and b) hate yourself most of the time because training is never about constant validation. I had an acting teacher who said “you’ve got to do the work because you love it and not because you want a ‘well done’” and honestly its some of the best advice I’ve ever been given.
And if you only love it when you get a ‘well done’ or when an audience applauds, its going to be a miserable career.
5. Question everything
Often in acting training, to get the full amount of learning out of an exercise you have to blindly stumble through accepting the weirdness and complete confusion. In those moments, overthinking or questioning every movement is totally counterproductive. However, after a days work it’s so important to ask yourself what actually worked for you, what you were okay with and what you weren’t comfortable with. Getting into a mindset of cult-like acceptance that everything you learn is gospel is dangerous because it limits your ability to set boundaries, doesn’t give you time to understand how you’re feeling and limits your ability to actually learn anything. Not everything you learn suits you as an actor — if training is like building a toolkit and why would you blindly fill a toolkit with things you don’t like to use?
