Fear of public speaking: why it happens, what the audience really sees, and what helps

Your name is on the agenda for Thursday, and you have known it for three weeks. You have slept badly for two of them. You have rehearsed the opening line in the shower, in the car and at three in the morning, and each time you picture the same thing: the faces turning towards you, your voice starting to shake, your mind going white, and everyone seeing it. Part of you is already working out how to get out of it. A cold would do. So would a new job.

If you know this feeling, whether it comes before a conference talk, a team update, a wedding speech, a reading at a funeral, a tutorial or simply being asked to “say a few words”, this page is for you. It explains why speaking in front of people can set off such a strong alarm, what an audience actually notices, how we fill a room of strangers with our own self-criticism, what helps before, during and afterwards, and how the fear is treated when it has started to shape your work or your life. It treats speaking as what it is: one person telling other people something. Not a performance to be marked.

You are in very large company

This is the most common social fear there is. When researchers rang a random sample of adults in a Canadian city, a third said they became excessively anxious speaking to a large audience. What they dreaded will sound familiar: trembling or showing other signs of nerves (eight in ten), the mind going blank (three in four), saying or doing something embarrassing, and being unable to carry on. For most it had started in their teens. One in ten said it had seriously got in the way of their work, their education or their social life, or caused them real distress. Stein, Walker and Forde, 1996.

Some people fear only this, and are at ease in conversation, at parties and one to one. Reviewers of the research regard that as a distinct pattern, not a mild form of something bigger. Blöte and colleagues, 2009. For others it is one part of a wider social anxiety: a fear of being judged that also shows up in meetings, on the phone, when eating in front of people or meeting strangers. Either way it is a recognised difficulty and not a flaw in your character, and either way it responds well to help.

Why it feels so dangerous

Standing alone in front of a group, with every eye on you and no easy way out, is exactly the kind of situation the body’s alarm system was built to notice. It releases adrenaline to get you ready for something demanding, and you feel it as a pounding heart, a dry mouth, shaking hands, a tight throat, heat in the face and a stomach that has dropped. Nothing has gone wrong. This is the same surge an athlete gets on the start line. Physical symptoms of anxiety explains each of these sensations.

What turns that surge into dread is a loop in the mind, and it runs like this. You set yourself a standard nobody could meet: fluent, witty, calm, no hesitation. As you start to speak, your attention turns inwards, onto your own heartbeat, your voice, your hands. From in there you build a picture of how you must look, and because the picture is made out of how you feel, it is far worse than the truth: you see someone visibly shaking and falling apart. To stop that happening you do things to keep safe: grip the lectern, read from the script, avoid every eye, speak fast to get it over. Afterwards you go back over it, find the worst moment, and file it as proof for next time. Hofmann, 2007. Each turn of the loop makes the next talk more frightening, and if you then start turning talks down, the fear never gets a chance to be proved wrong. The page on being afraid of the next panic attack describes the same mechanism, because for many people the real fear is of panicking in front of everyone.

What the audience really sees

Here is the most useful finding in this whole area. Researchers asked people with marked social anxiety, and people without, each to give a short speech with no preparation to a small audience. Then both the speakers and the audience rated how it had gone. The audience saw no overall difference between the two groups. The anxious speakers, though, rated themselves far worse than the audience had. Rapee and Lim, 1992.

In other words, most of what you fear is being seen is not being seen. Your heart cannot be heard from the third row. A tremor that feels like an earthquake from inside is a slight movement of a sheet of paper from outside, if it is noticed at all. A pause that feels like a minute lasts two seconds and looks like someone thinking. And audiences are not hunting for faults. Most people listening are quietly relieved that it is you up there and not them, most are on your side, and what they will remember tomorrow is one or two things you said, not how you looked while saying them.

The audience in your head: projection

There is a further reason why a room of listeners can feel so hostile, and it has little to do with the people in it. When we face people we do not know well, the mind does not leave the gaps empty. It fills them in, and the material nearest to hand is how we feel about and see ourselves. Psychotherapists call this projection. If I am critical of myself, I will find myself standing in front of an audience of critics, all looking at me sceptically. If I privately suspect I am dull, I will see boredom in every still face. If I feel like a fraud, the person writing a note in the second row is surely writing down my mistake.

The less we know someone, the more blanks there are to fill, which is why a hall of strangers can feel harsher than a room of colleagues, and why a neutral, concentrating face, which is simply what listening looks like, is so easily read as disapproval. The audience you dread is, to a large extent, a portrait of your own self-criticism, hung on people who have never had those thoughts about you. The research fits this: anxious speakers judge how they are coming across from how they feel inside, and the audience, asked directly, saw something far kinder. Hofmann, 2007; Rapee and Lim, 1992.

Two questions help to take the portrait down.

What is my purpose here? Very often it is simply to get information from A to B. You do not need to entertain these people, impress them or make them love you. You only need to give them the information they came for. That is a much smaller job than the one fear has set you, and it is one you can do while nervous.

Who is actually listening? Try to picture the real people. They are not you, and they do not share your private verdict on yourself. You may even know some of them. Whoever they are, they came because they want to hear something that you have. You do not have to know everything; that is not the reason your audience came. They came for the part you do know.

How fear changes the way we communicate

A talk is a conversation in which one person does most of the speaking. It works for the same reasons a good conversation works: you have something to say, you say it to these particular people, and you notice whether they are with you. Fear pulls every one of those apart, and most of what goes wrong on the day is not nerves showing but nerves changing how we communicate.

• Performing instead of telling. The aim slides from “help these people understand this” to “get through it without being found out”. The audience stops being people you are talking to and becomes a panel of judges, the projected critics described above, which is exactly what makes them frightening.
• The script as a shield. Reading every word feels safe and cuts you off from the room. Written sentences are longer and stiffer than spoken ones, your eyes stay down, and if you lose your place there is nothing underneath to carry you.
• Learning it by heart. Memorising word for word is fragile in the same way. One dropped phrase and the whole thread goes, because you were reciting, not explaining. This is where most blanks come from.
• Rushing. Adrenaline speeds everything up. You talk faster, breathe less, run out of air mid-sentence, and the shortness of breath then feels like panic. Listeners cannot keep up, and you take their puzzled faces as disapproval.
• No pauses. Silence feels like failure, so every gap is filled with “um”, “so” or the next sentence. Pauses are when an audience catches up and when you breathe. A speaker who pauses looks in command of the material.
• Looking at nobody. Eyes on the notes, the screen, the back wall or the ceiling. It protects you from seeing a critical face, and it also stops you seeing the friendly ones, which are the majority and would have steadied you.
• Watching yourself instead of them. Monitoring your voice, your hands, your blushing. Attention is limited: every bit spent on yourself is taken from what you are saying, which is why the mind goes blank, and it feeds the distorted picture of how you look.
• Hiding behind the slides. Dense slides read aloud with your back half-turned. The slides become the talk, and you become their narrator.
• Apologising in advance. “I’m not very good at this”, “Sorry, this will be boring”, “Bear with me, I’m nervous”. It is meant to lower expectations and it tells people what to look for. Saying once, lightly, that you are a little nervous is different, and often helps.
• Trying to say everything. Fear of being caught out leads to cramming in every fact and caveat. The message drowns, you run out of time, and you finish feeling it went badly.
• Dreading the questions. A question feels like an exam. In fact it means someone was listening and wants more, and “I don’t know, I’ll find out and come back to you” is a perfectly good answer.
• The post-mortem. Going over it for days, replaying the one stumble and discounting the forty minutes that were fine. This is where the next bout of dread is manufactured.

Communication is the thread that runs through my own clinical work and writing. The page on communication in psychotherapy and counselling explains how therapy works on these habits, and the film piece on The King’s Speech is about finding a voice when shame gets in the way.

What helps beforehand

1. Decide what you want them to know. One sentence: “By the end, I want them to understand that…” If you can say that sentence, you can give the talk, and if everything else falls away on the day you can still say it.
2. Build it for the ear. Three or four points, in an order that makes sense, each with an example or a story. People remember stories and forget lists. Short sentences. If you would not say it across a table, do not say it from a stage.
3. Use notes, not a script. A card or a page of key words is the right support: enough to find your place, not enough to read. Know your first two sentences and your last one well, because the first minute is when the adrenaline peaks and a sure start carries you through it.
4. Rehearse out loud, standing up. Three or four times, to a wall, a friend or your phone. Not to memorise the words but to find them, differently each time. Time it; talks always run longer than you think.
5. Watch yourself once. Record a run-through and watch it as you would watch a stranger. Almost everyone is surprised by how ordinary and how composed they look. This is such a reliable corrective that it is built into the standard therapy. NICE.
6. See the room if you can. Stand where you will stand. Check the screen, the microphone and the clock. Fewer unknowns on the day means less for the alarm to seize on.
7. Do not try to calm down. Rename it. Most people believe the answer to pre-talk nerves is to relax. In a set of experiments that included public speaking, people who instead told themselves “I am excited” felt better and performed better than those who tried to calm down. Brooks, 2014. The body’s arousal is the same for both; in another study, simply being told that arousal helps performance improved results. Jamieson and colleagues, 2010. You are not trying to get rid of the energy. You are deciding what it is for.
8. Look after the basics. Sleep as well as you can, eat something, go easy on coffee, and move beforehand: a brisk ten-minute walk uses up some of the adrenaline. Arrive early enough not to rush in.
9. Leave alcohol out of it. A drink beforehand is one of the commonest props and one of the least helpful: it dulls your thinking, it teaches you that you cannot do it sober, and the dose creeps up.

What helps while you are speaking

1. Remember what you are there for. To get something from you to them. Not to entertain, not to be loved, not to know everything. When the inner critic starts up mid-sentence, come back to that: what do these people need to hear next?
2. Turn your attention outwards. This is the single most useful thing. Look at people. Notice who is nodding, who is writing, who looks puzzled. Think about whether they are following, not about how you are doing. Attention given to them is attention taken away from the inner commentary, and it is also simply what good speakers do.
3. Talk to one person at a time. Find a friendly face, say a whole sentence to that person, then move to another. A room of sixty becomes a string of short conversations.
4. Start slower than feels natural. Stand, breathe out, look up, and wait a second before the first word. Then speak at what feels like three-quarter speed. To the room it will sound normal.
5. Pause on purpose. At the end of each point, stop, breathe out, sip some water, look at your notes. Nobody minds. It reads as confidence and gives you your breath back.
6. Let the symptoms be there. Your heart will pound and your hands may shake, most strongly in the first minute or two, and then it eases as you get going. You do not have to hide it or stop it. Fighting it takes the attention you need for the talk. If your hands shake, put the notes on the table.
7. If your mind goes blank. Stop. Breathe out. Look at your notes; that is what they are for. Say the last point again in different words, or say “Let me come back to that” and move on, or simply “I’ve lost my thread for a moment”. Audiences forgive this instantly, because it happens to everyone they have ever listened to. There are more words for this moment in the short guide on when your mind goes blank.
8. Take questions as conversation. Listen to the whole question. Pause before answering. Say when you do not know. It is the part of a talk where you are allowed to be most yourself.
9. Finish on your one sentence. Say it, say thank you, stop. Do not trail off into apology.

Afterwards

The talk is not over when you sit down; for an anxious speaker the most damaging part is often still to come. The mind offers a replay, edited down to the worst ten seconds. Try not to take the bait. Instead, ask two questions and then leave it. What did I get across? What is one thing I would do differently next time? If you want a truer picture, ask one person you trust what they took from it, and believe the answer. Then do something ordinary with the rest of the day. A talk that was merely fine is a success: it is one more piece of evidence, and evidence is what this fear gives way to.

Building it up, a step at a time

Avoidance is what keeps this fear alive, and the way out runs in the other direction: speaking a little, often, in situations that stretch you without flooding you. The NHS advice for social anxiety is the same: break the frightening situation into smaller parts and work up. NHS. A ladder might look like this, though yours will be your own.

• Ask one question, or make one comment, in a meeting or class each week.
• Give a two-minute update to a small group you know.
• Read something aloud to a friend, then to a few people.
• Introduce a speaker, propose a toast, or thank someone in front of a group.
• Give five minutes to your own team, with notes.
• Join a speaking club or a class, where everyone is there for the same reason and the audience is on your side by design.
• Then the longer talk, the bigger room, the unfamiliar audience.

Stay on each rung until it is merely uncomfortable, then go up one. On each, drop one prop: speak from notes where you used to read, look up where you used to look down, leave out the apology. Expect anxiety on the way; it is the point, not a sign that it is going badly. A bad one does not send you back to the start. And the guide to confidence before you feel ready is about exactly this: acting first, and letting the feeling follow.

At work and in study

Many people arrange whole careers around not having to speak: turning down the promotion, letting a colleague present their work, choosing the course without the oral exam. If you recognise that, it is worth knowing that you are allowed to ask for a way in. Most managers and tutors would far sooner hear “I find presenting hard and I’m working on it. Could I start with the short update, or present jointly this time?” than lose you from the role. Notes, a seat instead of a stage, slides sent in advance, or going first so the wait is shorter are all reasonable things to ask for. The guides on problems at work and anxiety at work have more on raising things with a manager.

When it is more than nerves, and how it is treated

Some nervousness before speaking is universal and useful. It is worth getting help when the fear is deciding things for you: when you are turning down work or study you want, when the dread starts weeks ahead and costs you sleep, when you have had a panic attack while speaking or fear that you will, when you need a drink or a tablet to get through it, or when it has spread to meetings, phone calls and ordinary conversation.

The treatment with the best evidence is a psychological one, and it is short. A review of 30 randomised trials found that psychological treatments clearly reduce the fear of public speaking, that the gains were large at follow-up, and that people went on improving after the treatment had finished. Treatments delivered online or with other technology did as well as face to face. Ebrahimi and colleagues, 2019. Practising in front of a virtual audience worked as well as practising in front of a real group in one trial, with the benefit lasting a year. Anderson and colleagues, 2013.

Where public speaking is part of a wider social anxiety, current guidance recommends individual cognitive behavioural therapy designed for social anxiety, usually up to fourteen sessions over about four months. It works on the loop described above: experiments that show what self-focused attention and safety behaviours actually do, watching yourself on video to correct the picture in your head, practice in turning attention outwards, testing your predictions in real situations, and breaking the habit of dreading beforehand and dissecting afterwards. NICE. Across more than a hundred trials, this kind of therapy was among the most effective treatments. Mayo-Wilson and colleagues, 2014. Other approaches help too; some people need to understand where the fear of being judged began before they can put it down.

About medication. Where medication is used for social anxiety, guidance recommends an SSRI antidepressant, and advises against the routine use of benzodiazepine tranquillisers and against St John’s wort and other over-the-counter remedies. NICE. People often ask about beta blockers such as propranolol, which some doctors prescribe to steady the heart and hands before a particular event. They can ease those physical symptoms; they do nothing for the thoughts, the evidence that they treat anxiety disorders is too thin to support routine use, and they are not safe for everyone, including people with asthma, low blood pressure, a slow pulse, some heart conditions or diabetes. Steenen and colleagues, 2016; NHS. Never take one that was prescribed for somebody else. Any decision about medication, including a tablet for a single occasion, needs to be discussed with a qualified prescriber.

If your heart races, you feel faint or you have chest pain at times that have nothing to do with speaking, or if these symptoms are new, see your doctor; do not assume it is nerves.

If you would like to work on this with me, I offer therapy for anxiety in Dublin 2 and by video call across Ireland, where that is suitable. The social anxiety page sets out the wider picture.

Talking to someone

It can be very helpful to talk to someone. This is a fear people hide with great skill, so almost everyone who has it believes they are the only one in the room. Saying it to one person usually brings two discoveries: that they have felt it too, and that it was far less visible than you thought. A few ways to begin:

There are more words to borrow in the free communication and appointment prompts. Choose someone who is kind to you; a person who mocks or belittles you is not the one to practise in front of.

If you need help now

If you are in immediate danger, or cannot keep yourself safe, contact your local emergency services straight away. Ireland 112 or 999; UK 999 or 112; rest of the EU 112; US and Canada 911; Australia 000; New Zealand 111; elsewhere, your local emergency number.

Someone to listen, day or night: Samaritans 116 123 (Ireland, UK); text HELLO to 50808 (Ireland); call or text 988 (US, Canada); Lifeline 13 11 14 (Australia); call or text 1737 (New Zealand); elsewhere, findahelpline.com lists free helplines.

Sources

• Stein, Walker and Forde (1996): public-speaking fears in a community sample
• Blöte and colleagues (2009): the relation between public speaking anxiety and social anxiety, a review
• Hofmann (2007): cognitive factors that maintain social anxiety disorder
• Rapee and Lim (1992): discrepancy between self- and observer ratings of performance in social phobics
• Brooks (2014): get excited, reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement
• Jamieson and colleagues (2010): reappraising arousal improves performance
• Ebrahimi and colleagues (2019): psychological interventions for the fear of public speaking, a meta-analysis
• Anderson and colleagues (2013): virtual reality exposure therapy for social anxiety disorder, a randomised trial
• Mayo-Wilson and colleagues (2014): psychological and pharmacological interventions for social anxiety disorder in adults, a network meta-analysis
• Steenen and colleagues (2016): propranolol for the treatment of anxiety disorders, a systematic review and meta-analysis
• NICE CG159: social anxiety disorder, recognition, assessment and treatment (2013)
• NHS: social anxiety (social phobia)
• NHS: propranolol, who can and cannot take it