Public Speaking Stress Peaks One Minute Into Speech

Newswise — People with low anxiety about public speaking feel the most stress right before they start to talk. For highly worried speakers, however, stress doesn't abate right away. Instead it peaks in the first minute after they start their speech.

That's one finding from a new study of the relationship between psychological and physical indicators of public speaking anxiety.

"Somatic Anxiety Patterns Before, During, and After Giving a Public Speech," examined the stress-based gastrointestinal responses of 96 speakers divided into two groups: those with lower anxiety about public speaking and those with higher anxiety.

The paper is in the March 2006 issue of the Southern Communication Journal. It was authored by Dr. Paul L. Witt, Dr. Chris R. Sawyer, and Dr. Ralph R. Behnke, all in the Department of Communication Studies at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, and by doctoral student Kennaria C. Brown of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, doctoral student James B. Roberts of the University of Texas at Austin, and Jessica Weisel of Collin County Community College in Texas.

The speakers, 48 men and 48 women, were undergraduates in a beginning public-speaking class. They represented a wide range of academic majors and a cross-section of the student population. After making a five-minute speech, each student completed a detailed report of their anxiety levels and gastrointestinal sensations before, during, and after the speech.

"This study was about how anxiety manifests itself physically," says Dr. Witt of TCU. Previous research looked at increased heart rates, sweaty palms, and trembling as physical indicators of public-speaking anxiety. The current study was the first to explore the differences in intensity of gastrointestinal distress between public speakers with high anxiety versus those with low anxiety.

It was also the first to examine the changes in intensity of gastrointestinal responses at four speech "milestones": the minute prior to starting to speak, the first minute of the speech, the last minute of the speech, and the minute immediately following the end of the speech.

The responses for the low-anxiety speakers and the high-anxiety speakers were then compared at the four speech milestones. The sensations studied were described as a lump in the throat, butterflies or knots in the stomach, and nausea. Such sensations can distract or interrupt speakers, particularly those who are highly anxious.

The study revealed striking differences between the low-anxiety and high-anxiety groups in both the magnitude and patterns of physical stress at the milestones, thus providing important new information about speech anxiety.

"Results at the four speech milestones showed that the low-anxiety speakers and high-anxiety speakers did not experience the event in the same way," says Dr. Witt.

Highly anxious speakers had significantly higher levels of gastrointestinal symptoms than did the less anxious at each of the four speech milestones. This linked a greater intensity in physical symptoms with a personality trait toward greater anxiety, which was expected.

The contrasting patterns of anxiety changes between the low-anxiety speakers and the high-anxiety speakers, however, revealed a previously undetected connection between anxiety tendencies and responses at the milestones.

Specifically, low-anxiety speakers felt the most stress just before they started speaking, but their anxiety decreased as they started, and continued declining to the end of the speech. The stress of high-anxiety speakers instead peaked in the first minute after they began speaking, at the same point the low-anxiety participants had started rapidly calming down. Then the gastrointestinal sensations of the highly anxious began falling as the speakers continued, and substantially declined as they progressed toward the end.

The low-anxiety speakers, Dr. Witt explains, began managing their stress and settling into the role of public speaker almost immediately when they began to speak, achieving stress relief earlier in the process than did the high-anxiety speakers.

Both groups of speakers reported an increase in stress symptoms immediately after the speech ended, probably indicating their concerns about the audience's evaluation of their performance, but this increase was statistically significant only among the high-anxiety speakers.

Since personality traits such as speech anxiety are thought to be essentially stable and unchangeable, the decline in stress while actually speaking was an intriguing finding for the high-anxiety participants, says Dr. Witt. It suggests that anxiety levels can be modified even for the highly nervous.

By studying what triggers the physical sensations of public-speaking anxiety, he says, educators may be able to develop exercises and techniques to reduce them. The implication is that controlling the physiological symptoms of stress may help control the stress itself.

"You'd think that a personality trait is an enduring part of a person's makeup, and that no intervention could change it," he says. "But we've shown that traits are variable. As people learn how to experience less physical discomfort about giving a speech, that positive reinforcement may begin to chip away at a life-long dread of public speaking."