Nerves before you speak, and the two things that help
By Dara Halloran · Under Pressure
How do you overcome nerves before speaking? You will not make them disappear, and trying to calm down at the lectern usually backfires. Do five minutes of slow breathing beforehand, with the exhale longer than the inhale. In the last seconds, call the feeling excitement rather than trying to feel calm. Then stop watching yourself: monitoring your own delivery is what makes it worse.
Almost everybody is nervous before speaking, the nerves are largely physiological, and the standard advice about them is wrong in a specific and correctable way.
"Calm down" is the wrong instruction
The reflex advice before a talk is to relax. Alison Brooks tested that directly across several experiments (karaoke, a maths test, and a public speech), comparing people told to say "I am calm" against people told to say "I am excited".1
The excitement group outperformed the calm group, and were rated as more persuasive and more competent by observers.
The reasoning she gives is that anxiety and excitement are the same high-arousal state with opposite valences, so relabelling is a short move. Going from high arousal to calm is a long one, and attempting it while your heart is at 110 mostly produces the discovery that you have failed to calm down, which is worse than where you started.
This is a real finding with a real limit: it reappraises arousal and leaves it in place. You will still be nervous. You will be nervous and pointed in a more useful direction.
What the body work is for, then
If "calm down" is the wrong instruction, what is the breathing for?
Timing. The 2023 breathing trial measured mood and physiological arousal across a month of daily five-minute practice, and found reductions in respiratory rate and improvements in mood.2 That is a background effect on the state you walk in with, built up over weeks. You cannot throw it like a switch at the lectern.
So the two interventions do different jobs at different times:
- Before, in the quiet five minutes: slow breathing, working on the arousal you arrive with.
- In the last ten seconds, when the arousal is already there: relabel it. "I am excited."
Doing the second one is what stops the first one from being an attempt to reach a calm you were never going to reach.
Why it feels worse than it looks
Two more things worth knowing, both of which reduce the size of the problem.
McCroskey's work on communication apprehension established it as a stable, measurable trait rather than a personal failing.3 It varies widely between people and is a normal individual difference, like introversion. It is not evidence that something is wrong with you.
And Beilock and Carr's work on choking under pressure found that a particular kind of attention is what degrades performance: when a practised skill is executed under pressure, attending to the step-by-step mechanics of it makes it worse.4 The relevance to speaking is direct. Monitoring your own delivery while delivering is the failure mode. Whatever you were going to say is better rehearsed than your real-time supervision of it.
What reappraisal cannot do
The reappraisal finding holds up, and it is also small and situational. It will not touch a clinical anxiety disorder, and nobody in this article claims otherwise; that is a matter for a clinician rather than a speaking club.
And note what we cannot show: we have no data of our own on any of this. The club has never run a controlled comparison of members who breathe before speaking against members who do not, and until it does, the sentence "our members who use Breathe score higher" is one we are not entitled to write.
The practical version
- Five minutes of slow breathing beforehand, with the exhale longer than the inhale.
- At the lectern, do not try to be calm. Name it as excitement.
- Do not watch yourself speak. You rehearsed the talk; you did not rehearse the supervision.
References
- Brooks, A. W. (2014). Get excited: reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(3), 1144–1158. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035325
- Balban, M. Y., Neri, E., Kogon, M. M., et al. (2023). Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal. Cell Reports Medicine, 4(1), 100895. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xcrm.2022.100895
- McCroskey, J. C. (1977). Oral communication apprehension: A summary of recent theory and research. Human Communication Research, 4(1), 78–96. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.1977.tb00599.x
- Beilock, S. L., & Carr, T. H. (2001). On the fragility of skilled performance: What governs choking under pressure?. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130(4), 701–725. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.130.4.701