Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Fear of Public Speaking

Episode Date: April 24, 2019

Speaking in public is frequently cited as people’s number one fear, even more fearful than death. Most people go through life avoiding public speaking, but it turns out that only makes things worse. The best medicine? Public speaking. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, there's Josh, the other Josh, who's now become our go-to guest producer.

And this is short stuff, enough about that. Yeah, we fired Frank the chair and the little water dipping bird that pressed record, which was our standby. Yeah, the bird really started to phone things in, don't you think? I think so. Chuck, speaking of phoning things in,

imagine having to do public speaking. I can't imagine what that must be like. Do you remember, I mean, we've done plenty of talks, we've done live shows, that's just kind of part of what we do. Do you remember the crippling stage fright I used to get? Yeah, I mean, we both had varying levels early on. It's not like I was always a cool cucumber. Yeah, you seemed like it.

Well, that you didn't go into the bathroom with me. Mom was before showtime. I always wanted to. But yeah, you were, you were, that threw me. You always were a bit more nervous, but I think you're just wound a little tighter in general. But we both overcame that for the most part, don't you think?

Yeah, yeah, and you know how we overcame it? I can tell you how, and I know that you know how, but let's tell everybody else. We did it. We're basically exposure therapy, just doing it. Totally. And it turns out what we're talking about is just public speaking in general.

But the fear of public speaking almost goes hand in hand with public speaking. I saw a stat that said that 75% of people, of people in the world have a fear of public speaking. I'm surprised it's not more than that, to be honest. I am too. And then there's that old trope, the idea that there is some pole taken somewhere

of what Americans fear the most. And number one was public speaking. And number two was death. And Jerry Seinfeld turned that into, that meant that most people would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy, because of that fear of public speaking. And there's a word for it too.

It's called glossophobia, which is great work. Yeah, I mean, it's a real thing. And we should point out that it is a legit anxiety disorder, a social anxiety disorder for most people. Like, I had a bit of the jitters. I don't think I was had a technical, I was a technical glossophobe. Right.

But for a lot of people, it's not just like, I'm nervous, my palms are sweaty. For some people, it's debilitating to the point where they will structure their life so that they never have to do that. Never have a job where they have to speak in front of like a conference room, you know? Right, or a small handful of people, basically anybody,

they always want to be the ones in the audience. They don't want to be the ones giving the talk. So much so, like you said, they'll structure their life around avoiding it. Avoidance is like the number one go-to thing that people do when they suffer from glossophobia. They just do whatever they can to not give that talk. That's right.

Like you said, it's a subset of a social anxiety disorder, which is really at base, a social anxiety disorder, is a performance fear. It's the fear of being judged and or failing. That's what it is. Among your peers, yeah. It's the fear of the result. Not like, I mean, it manifests its ways

as you like walk up on that stage, but what you're really afraid of is saying the wrong thing, feeling like you've said something dumb, being judged as not knowing what you're talking about. And that's why it helped us because we have a very forgiving, loving, loyal audience whenever we go out to do live shows.

It makes it a lot easier than, and we've done talks where we weren't full in a room full of stuff you should know fans, and those are always more nerve-wracking for me. Well, they also always went really poorly too. You're kind of right. But one of the problems though with this is like that you're not only a fear,

not knowing what you're talking about or being judged and failing, but also catastrophically screwing up, like forgetting your place, maybe bursting into tears and running off of stage. And so you fear these things, but the insidious thing about glossophobia or really any social anxiety disorder

is that you come to fear the fear, right? It's not like you experience just the fear while you're up on stage. You fear this failure, this whatever it is you're having to do for a very long stretch ahead of time. And that is the most crippling part of any social anxiety disorder,

the fear of the fear associated with it. And that's what leads to the avoidance. Right, so let's take a quick break and we're gonna come back and talk about how this manifests itself and what you can do about it right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you wanna know, then you're in luck. Just listen up to Josh and Chuck, stuff you should know. All right, so you've got to give a talk at your school or whatever, which I did, by the way. My very first big in front of people speaking,

and not just like classroom size, was when I ran for vice president of student council. I had to speak in front of the entire school in the gym. And it was pretty nerve-wracking. New locker combos for everyone. Was that your platform? No, what was it Brady? No, Happy Days was angled parking.

That was the big thing that Richie was running on. Was it really? Yeah. Man, that's an arcane trivia question right there. I have no idea how that stuck with me. But what you will feel in your body, which is what I felt back then and what I don't so much feel now, is on edge.

If it's really bad, a sense of panic and doom, your heart's gonna be beating faster. These are like literal physical changes. You will be sweating, especially if you're me. You might be trembling. You might feel weak and dizzy. You might have trouble sleeping in the days proceeding. Four weeks.

Four weeks. I have trouble sleeping after shows because of just the adrenaline. Just because you're so amped. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, there's definitely a come down stage. But all this is actually science

and physiological things that are going on in your body. Isn't that right? Yeah, and the reason why you're having this physiological reaction is because the whole thing, any social anxiety disorder, but also glossophobia, since it's a subset of that, is centered around the amygdala, which regulates our emotions.

And for some reason, they think it starts in childhood probably, where there's just some sort of innate shyness that doesn't dealt with and just grows and grows and grows as an adult. But you start to associate performance with fear. And the amygdala then when it senses that there's some sort of performance impending

starts to freak you out. It associates performance with that fear and not only things that have gone wrong in the past, but all the things that could go wrong in the future and releases the same stress hormones that it releases if a bear suddenly shows itself to you and takes a swipe at you with its claws, which means that the fight-or-flight response is kicked in.

So you're having a physiological fight-or-flight response, which is why you feel like you want to run from wherever the place you have to give the talk is. Just run forever, quit your job, start a new life, maybe grow a mustache as a disguise. Yeah, and as a kid, it can very easily be avoided instead of dealt with. And then that fear just never is overcome

and you become an adult who has that same fear. And you walk a really fine line as a parent. I'm already seeing this with like, no, you don't have to do that if it freaks you out too much or you don't want to be the 50s parent either that's like, no, get on that high dive and jump. Back then they thought they were helping. Like my dad, I was scared of roller coasters

and he told me, I'm not bringing you back anymore then if you don't get on this roller coaster right now. And I did and I loved it. However, I mean, people don't parent that way anymore. So you really got to walk that fine line of encouragement and maybe like, it might be good if you could overcome this fear without traumatizing them at the same time.

Right, you have to figure out a way to trick them into doing it. Kind of, there's a lot of trickery involved. I can imagine there has to be, there's your fine line, there's the balance struck right there. But avoidance is not going to solve your problem. And experts say, if you have to overcome this fear or want to, you got to do what we did

and you got to just kind of start doing it on a smaller scale ideally. Right, so if you really, really have it bad, and this is say like affecting you personally or professionally or whatever, it would help probably to go seek a cognitive behavioral therapist who's going to help you retrain your brain

to see things differently so that your brain doesn't associate public speaking with abject fear and terror. And the way that you do this, like you said, just kind of starting out small, maybe giving a speech alone in a room and then moving up to one in front of a friend, then a handful of friends.

Or your dog, maybe even for sure. I'll bet your dog wouldn't judge you. Most dogs aren't very judgy. Usually. And then maybe moving up to something like Toastmasters, like a supportive group that is, that can really help you and give you a chance to give speeches in front of other people

who are very supportive and aren't going to judge you. And then you just keep going and pushing yourself and pushing yourself. And by doing that over and over again, in increasingly anxiety inducing settings, you retrain your brain so that it doesn't associate terror. It associates good things instead, like that being pumped up on adrenaline afterwards

because you're so thrilled with yourself. Yeah, I've been to many weddings where I feel bad for the Toastmaster that was kind of, that position was shoved onto them. And it ruins the wedding up until that point for them a lot of times. Cause you can just tell, they're just like, I didn't want to do this, man.

I've just been going over and been writing. And I just always feel so bad. I thought you were going to say it ruins the wedding. Well, it ruins their experience until it's over. And then they just get plastered. Right. But one of the things you can do too, no matter whether you're performing for yourself

in a room alone or in front of like a room full of people, one way to really help yourself is to know the material, to be prepared and not just memorize it. Because if you memorize it, you can lose your place and then you're just toast to know the material so much that you can improv and add lib whenever needed. Cause there's such a thing as hecklers out there

and they will try to throw you off. But if you know the stuff, you can find your place again and be much more comfortable. That's the advice I always give to people is if you're nervous, just know the material inside and out and then you can start to relax and make the jokes that people love. That's good advice.

If your crutch is the actual material, then you're in good shape. Right. So that's it for public speaking. Get out there and speak publicly. And in the meantime, this is short stuff out. The Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

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