UPDATED: Conquer Speaker’s Anxiety Biologically
By Steve Johnson
What to do with your anxiety when speaking? You may find yourself in front of 100 people. Or it might be 10. Or it may be one – one very…important…person. And on the spectrum of anxious moments, your body’s response can impact your effectiveness. How to overcome anxiety when front and center is a common question I get. What exercises or techniques can eliminate the anxiety, the fear, the nervousness, the doubt?
Nothing but consistent success in the situation can fully eliminate these feelings. But one needs to start somewhere, and these feelings can be mitigated in the short-term. Today’s lesson: addressing speaker’s anxiety biologically will help eliminate it mentally.
Interestingly, our body’s reaction of anxiety and fear is the same as its reaction of excitement. That’s due to the hypothalamus.
“Essentially the limbic system comprises the regions of the brain that are all connected to the hypothalamus, which controls the body’s stress response. So, fear activates the hypothalamus in the same way as excitement.” (Dr. Alex Korb, “Predictable Fear,” Psychology Today, October 31, 2014)
Since all of this is connected, and you can tell yourself speaking is what you want to do, you can start getting yourself used to the idea that the dopamine reward is linked to excitement and not fear. It’s a bit meta, but you’re using the mind to think your body is controlling the mind.
Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer Kelly McGonigal is the author of “The Willpower Instinct: The Upside of Stress” and “The Joy of Movement: How Exercise Helps Us Find Happiness, Hope, Connection, and Courage.” On a recent podcast where she discussed speaker’s anxiety, she said “What I have come to value about anxiety, is it’s a sign that I care.”
You can begin to mentally prepare yourself with the perspective of opportunity to gain versus position to lose. Your heart is in the opportunity to do well, and you can mentally use the energy to propel you forward.
Fight, flight, freeze
Getting ready to go up to the podium is tough for many people. Adrenaline and epinephrine set us up to fight, for flight, or to freeze – sometimes toward, but often from the experience ahead of us. However, our bodies perceive the experience the same way.
A 2018 paper out of Stanford University published in Nature outlined a brain circuit that controls the movement toward threats. The study concluded that forward movement under conditions of anxiety or high levels of alertness triggers the activation of a circuit deep in the brain that releases the neurochemical dopamine. Dopamine is most associated with the sensation of reward. But dopamine also increases the probability that we’ll strive for similar goals in the future. Dopamine isn’t just a reward; it is a driver. Once we align the anxiety and stress response with the excitement response, we can align the reward and make the experience more enjoyable.
But a better approach for more immediate rewards is to find biological solutions to managing the stress, anxiety and fear. And there are many you can perform just ahead of and during your time in the sightline of your peers.
Eye exercise
Move your eyes from left to right for about 30 seconds while imagining the challenges and stressful in front of you. This is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing or EMDR. Francine Shapiro, a psychologist, developed this eight-phase therapy in the late1980s to treat trauma. But it works for alleviating stress and anxiety in the short term, as well. In the 30 years since her initial experiments, tens of controlled trials have confirmed it as an effective treatment for PTSD.
But the therapy also is effective in treating the “everyday” memories that cause people to experience low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, and attachment difficulties. The movement triggers suppression of the amygdala, this fear center in the brain; it creates a state of reduced stress, and then you’re able to better approach things with more ease.
Breathing
For more nearly 100 years, it’s been known that when stressed, you’re breathing less deeply. But a good exercise isn’t focused on taking a deep breath in, it’s letting a deep breath out. Exhale-emphasized breathing brings much more rapid activation of the calming arm of the nervous system.
A double inhale (inhale through the nose, and then before exhaling, sneak in a little bit more air), then a long exhale. The alveoli of the lungs are contiguous with the blood supply. So, when you exhale, you offload carbon dioxide, and a lot of the stress response is due to elevated carbon dioxide in the bloodstream.
Stressed alveoli collapse. To reinflate, the double inhale brings maximal air into the lungs and then you offload the maximum amount of carbon dioxide when you exhale. Stanford studies show within just one to three exhales, the autonomic nervous system starts to shift more towards calmness.
This also works with more continuous slow breathing. Author and journalist James Nestor (Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art) highlights this often. He has learned that inhaling and exhaling slowly sends messages to you brain that you’re in a calm state. Again, use your mind to tell your body to act in a way that sends messages back to your brain. “When you do that, the rest of the body responds,” he says. Inhale through the nose to a three count, exhale to a six or seven count.
Hands
Simply using your hands is a natural outlet for nervous energy. It is an opportunity to use your adrenaline to your advantage. When your hands get to the peripheral of your field of vision, you are broadening the field and pushing back on the narrow field that comes with stress and anxiety. Scientifically, you are moving yourself to the parasympathetic (business as usual) from the sympathetic nervous system (flight).
In the end, there are exercises and techniques can eliminate the anxiety, the fear, the nervousness, the doubt. If you’re looking for a way to immediate address speaker’s anxiety, address your biology and you’ll eventually eliminate it mentally.