Presentation Anxiety

The three main causes of presentation nerves

You know your material, your audience wants to hear it and yet your legs have turned to jelly, your mouth has gone dry and you would give anything to get out of the situation.

Why can we remain perfectly calm driving at 80mph down a busy motorway and yet be terrified of speaking to a group of people?

The first step to overcoming fear of public speaking is to understand the three main causes.

Social Acceptance

An audience is unlikely to eat you. So why do presentations instill such fear? It is because we are so physically vulnerable.

A tiger has powerful claws, an antelope can run fast and a hedgehog has protective spines. As humans we are neither strong, nor fast nor protected. In our evolutionary past, we survived by banding together in groups. For an early human, being cast out of a group could have been a matter of life or death. Times have changed, but part of us is still hyper-vigilant to the danger of exclusion, which is why group attention can make us feel like an early human in danger of being sent to fend for him or herself alone.

Learned Fear

In general, fear is a pretty useful thing! The fight or flight response gives us a physical ‘turbo charge’ if we are in danger. Heart beating hard to pump more blood, breathing fast to get more oxygen, legs ready to run. Pretty handy if there is a tiger lunging at you. Not so handy if you are about to make a presentation. Your brain is trying to protect you. It is just getting it wrong.

The fight or flight response can also create an emergency short cut in our brains. Thinking takes time, something we might not have in an emergency. So if a part of your brain called the amygdala perceives a danger, it can route a signal directly to the fight or flight response to call a ‘red alert’, bypassing your conscious awareness. That is why, even though you might know there is nothing to be afraid of, the fear response can fire off anyway. It happens faster than you can think about it and shuts down the neo-cortex, the thinking part of your brain, until the danger is over. That is why people go blank or stumble over their words under pressure.

Another safety device your amygdala employs is emotional memory. If as an early human you had a narrow escape with a tiger, for example, your amygdala would have stored any patterns about that experience as a guide for the future. Then, if it spotted a similar pattern again, it would fire off the fight or flight response to save you just in case. A good bet from an evolutionary point of view. If it is right, it saves your life. If it is wrong, it has only used up some energy needlessly.

The learned fear response remains until it is relearned. This is what lies behind the common pattern when someone used to be confident making presentations (young children naturally seek attention almost all the time), then had a scary experience and now cannot seem to shake it off. The amygdala has stored something about that scary experience and keeps triggering the emergency fight or flight response whenever it spots something similar.

The fear can be easily retrained, but in a particular way, which I will explain later.

Being Unused to It

Anxiety and fear are designed to keep us away from things. So it is quite natural if you feel anxious about presenting (or anything else) to avoid doing it. This means you do not get the practice you need to get better. You would not expect to learn to drive a car from reading about it and then to get in and be perfect first time. Avoiding presentations creates space for anxiety to grow and it can become a problem even if you have never actually had a bad experience. Your brain has imagined a bad experience and learned a fear response from that.

So how can you become more confident?

Next: Overcoming Fear of Public Speaking