The vicious circle

The fear of speaking can be understood as a situation where we need to speak in front of others that activates our fight or flight response, which is basically a survival mechanism that triggers when the brain perceives that there is a threat that makes us have to escape or seek safety. A public speaking situation can activate a fight or escape response because the brain cannot distinguish between real threats to our survival, such as being almost run over by a car, and "perceived" threats, such as that everyone will think we are completely useless when they hear us speak. The fight or flight response is helpful in situations where we really need to act in order to survive, but it doesn’t help us in public speaking situations.

Our reaction involves thoughts, emotions and physical symptoms. Examples of thoughts that come up are: “They think I’m bad”, “My presentation is really lousy” and “Everyone can see how uncomfortable I am”. In addition to these thoughts and interpretations of the situation, there are often also memories and negative associations from previous bad experiences with presentations. The audience can be perceived as overly demanding, critical and looking to find fault. This can contribute to a strong experience of social threat and make us feel worry, shame or other negative emotions. We can experience physical reactions such as palpitations, chest pain, dizziness, dry mouth or sweating.

To deal with the discomfort, we use different behaviours. Some of these are called safety behaviours and aim to help us avoid discomfort, or to reduce discomfort if it is unavoidable. Here are some examples:

• Asking the teacher for another task
• Calling in sick 
• Imagining various disasters and how to resolve them
• Talking very quickly or in a very low voice during presentations
• Skipping paragraphs in the manuscript
• Looking down at the paper and reading word-for-word from it to avoid seeing the audience
• Under-preparing a presentation because it may feel easier afterwards to think that it didn’t go well because I didn’t do my best.
• Spending an unreasonable amount of time preparing
• Dwelling on the presentation afterwards
• Asking questions to others to make sure it wasn’t that bad

One particular behaviour associated with speech anxiety is what we call self-focused attention. This means that while we try to focus on presenting something, we also keep an eye on ourselves and how we think we are perceived from the outside. “How do I look?”, “What do they think of what I’m saying?”, “How am I talking?”, “Do I seem nervous?”  

Safety behaviours and self-focused attention help keep the fear of speaking in front of others alive, even though we hope they will reduce our anxiety. The reason is that they reinforce our subjective negative picture of the situation and prevent us from noticing positive information. We think that we just about managed to cope with the situation, thanks to our safety behaviour. After a difficult presentation, the situation can continue to be examined in our head based on everything that we felt went wrong. The memory of the presentation is coloured by the anxiety we had at the time and when it’s time for a new presentation, we take negative memories and expectations into that situation. Altogether, these factors work combine to ensure that an overly negative image of ourselves as speakers lives on.