When mindset fails: why the nervous system is key to treating public speaking nerves.

Your professional knowledge, your expertise, resides in a living, breathing meat suit consisting of nerve networks, connecting your brain and body, fascia, sinews, the works.

A complex system that sometimes produces unhelpful behaviours and reactions.

Take public speaking anxiety. Often misunderstood, oversimplified, dismissed, and even invalidated.

It causes tremendous suffering and drives competent, highly determined, ambitious and capable people to despair, even to tears.

When you get hijacked by severe speaking anxiety, clichés won’t fix your problem:

“Just tell yourself it’s excitement”

“Embrace nerves”

“Just imagine the audience naked”

“Everyone gets nervous”

“Nerves are a sign that you care”

Advice doled out with utter certainty by people who have read somewhere that anxiety and excitement are the same and fire up the same brain regions.

People who might be well-meaning but are not equipped to offer a solution.

Superficial advice can make you feel more isolated and ashamed because it’s meant to work, right?

Mindset approaches will not fix the problem.

Even the language, “I get nervous”, reveals that your nervous system is involved.

This is why, for moderate to severe public speaking anxiety, ‘mindset’ and cognitive approaches don't really provide relief. If you have mild nerves, you can ride the wave.

Take the common reframe: “Just tell yourself it’s excitement, not anxiety.”

This is an attempt to think differently about the physical and psychological symptoms that you're experiencing. Not stop them from happening.

So if you're feeling absolutely terrified and overwhelmed, your heart's racing, your mouth is dry, and you can't think clearly.

The mindset approach is to get you to “reframe” those feelings. To put a different spin on them.

The advice is: “Just tell yourself your utter fear is, in fact, excitement”. IE gaslight yourself.

There are various problems with this.  

One, it doesn't work for moderate to severe anxiety.

Two, it's a misunderstanding of how the anxiety response actually works. I mean the reality, not the superficial  ‘mind over matter’ theory.

When somebody is in the grip of severe performance anxiety, the nervous system has activated one of our primitive, hardwired survival responses, most often, flight.

For some reason, it has perceived a threat and then, without conscious input from your rational brain, automatically activates a survival response, usually, flight mode.

So your system gets flooded with adrenaline to prepare your body to mobilise to get away from the danger to save life and limb.

We are hardwired to do this when the nervous system perceives a threat. Real or imagined.

So in that moment, the top priority is safety and physical survival. Not your career, not your ambition, just get away from the danger fast.

In that physiological state, a lot of the blood gets diverted away from your rational brain, the bit that you need to remember what you're going to say, remember your figures, and look and perform like a cool and calm professional.

And that blood gets diverted to your body, because your body is getting ready to mobilise, and it also concentrates blood around your vital organs, because your system is primed for the worst-case scenario, “I might be getting physically attacked here”.

Just like the proverbial caveman running away from the sabre-tooth tiger.

When you have severe public speaking anxiety, this is what happens to you in a meeting. That's what happens when you’re standing at a lectern. That's what even happens when you see an email arrive with a speaking invitation.

Danger.

Cue Immediate hijack and freakout.

So ‘top-down’ reframing doesn't really land when your rational brain, your prefrontal cortex, is partially offline .

This is why calming the nervous system is the best way I've found to make a real difference to people suffering from this problem.

Once you learn how to calm your nervous system, you can then respond more accurately to the potential threat, and you can prepare yourself practically so that you can deliver without getting hijacked by uncontrollable nerves.

If you need to, you can learn extra skills from a presentation specialist, whether it's a technical specialist to help you prepare for TV or a high-stakes panel or just general presentation tips, so that you can do what's required.

This is why I work on the nervous system, because that's where the problem originates.

Once your nervous system is on board. Once your brain and your body feel safer, then you can work out what you actually need to do in order to deliver an excellent performance.

I hope that's helpful. If there's anything that I can do for you, don't hesitate to contact me in confidence.