THE FEAR OF PUBLIC SPEAKING

Rubric “PSYCHOLOGY OF EMOTIONS” by Diego Ingrassia – “THE FEAR OF PUBLIC SPEAKING”
for PSICOLOGIA CONTEMPORANEA – Fear -n. 266, March-April 2018 – GIUNTI EDITORE

Have you ever happened to be on stage or simply in front of a large group of people and, even though you know you are very well prepared, you are unable to remain calm and serene?
Your palms start to sweat, your throat goes dry, you desperately look for a glass of water, you somehow shut down, even though fighting against yourself has cost you an enormous amount of effort.
It is a much more common situation than you think, but this is certainly not enough to console you.
The resulting frustration can be very strong and the greatest desire at this point is to find a remedy.

Even one of the greatest orators ever, such as Cicero, admitted that he had to deal with the fear of public speaking. Fear is one of the most important emotions for every human being. Together with anger, it constitutes one of the fundamental building blocks for our survival.
These two emotions form the basis of the attack/flight reaction, which has played a very important function throughout our evolution. We share it with most animals, and not only with the more evolved ones, such as chimpanzees or bonobos, but also with many other, genetically more distant species, such as reptiles, insects and birds.

A concatenated series of hormones and neurotransmitters produces a reaction in the nervous system, which is transformed into behavioural sequences devoted to the defence of one’s own life.
In fact, an organism in a dangerous situation communicates with the entire body that something in the environment constitutes a threat. In the civilised world, most of the dangers our ancestors faced have disappeared, but our organism continues to be programmed to react automatically, and this happens even when the responses do not prove functional in relation to today’s dangers.

Basically, the same mechanism always operates: we are frightened, we feel threatened, and we behave accordingly. We avoid situations, people or behaviour for fear of suffering and feeling bad: fear of public speaking is a perfect example of this.
Evolution has ‘selected for us’ a number of fear-related behaviours that allowed our distant ancestors to survive and thus reproduce.

Marks and Bracha have identified 6 ways in which fear can make our bodies react in often entirely involuntary ways.
– Freezing: remaining still helps us to vigilantly assess the situation and not be seen.
– Escape: responding distances the person from specific threats.
– Fighting: attacking, striking or threatening a predator can neutralise the danger, knocking it out or causing it to flee.
– Submission (members of the same species): among chimpanzees, enacting submission signals to the alpha male effectively prevents a physical attack. The same can occur among humans.
– Pretending to be dead: in this type of response one pretends to be dead, immobilising oneself. The adaptive advantage is realised when fleeing or fighting would not help; for example, if the predator is too fast or too strong.
– Fainting: fainting means losing consciousness and signalling to the attacker that there is no threat to him.

It is evident how these behaviours prove to be dysfunctional in dealing with fears concerning social relationships, including the fear of public speaking.
It therefore becomes necessary to identifyappropriate strategies to handle this type of situation.
The first and most important resource we can draw on is the knowledge and awareness of how emotions act on us. Emotions happen, we cannot avoid them, but we can learn to manage them effectively. In short, to recognise in oneself and in others the signs that accompany the appearance of an emotional manifestation, and then to act on one’s thoughts and actions, thus modifying one’s communicative behaviour.

There is a period during which we are completely at the mercy of our emotions, technically called the ‘refractory period‘, during which emotion pervades us completely.
But just before this period, there is a lapse of time when we are aware that an emotion is brewing within us, and we realise this because we begin to perceive specific physiological signals of change. At that precise moment, it is possible to lengthen the time between the impulse that triggers the emotion and its peak intensity (the beginning of the refractory period), thanks to targeted awareness exercises and by formulating hypotheses about the reason why we are actually feeling the emotion. In fact, it is our interpretation of the situation that activates specific and personal ’emotional triggers’ in us that cause us to react in a certain way.
It is essential to be able to dwell on this distinction, because it is from this awareness that we can succeed in constructing effective strategies to manage our fears.

Returning, then, to the fear of public speaking, it should be noted that fear allows us to remain focused on our objective, and with a little experience we can transform it into energy and determination as we become familiar with the audience. For this to happen, however, it is necessary to stop fighting with oneself in an attempt to suppress one’s emotional reactions. Instead, one must manage to manage that energy in a different way, through careful exercise aimed at restructuring (i.e. giving them a different meaning) those thoughts that condition our emotional reaction. The important thing is to get used to grasping the moment before that phase of ’emotional sequestration’ beyond which it becomes difficult to escape a wave of sensations that will guide our every attitude.

There are various strategies we can implement to manage this emotion, such as techniques that exploit paradoxical thoughts. Their objective is to try to exorcise fear by taking it to excess, to the point of imagining the worst nightmare: having reached that apex, one can only get better.

Other techniques involve building a positive thinking aimed at identifying the internal resources we already possess. For example, I may think that I am lucky because I have hundreds of people who are there to listen to me, or that an opportunity like this will allow me to gain more visibility. If such thoughts are directed at feeding our deepest motivations, the possibility of using the energy generated by emotion in a functional way increases.

‘Knowing our own fears is the best way to deal with the fears of others’ claimed Jung.
I like to add that this is the only way we can really help them.