Managing physical anxiety symptoms

- Your heart is pounding, your palms are sweaty, your legs are shaking, and your mouth is dry. If you're like most of us, this is your body getting ready to present in front of others. These symptoms are very normal and natural yet they make you look nervous in front of your audience and they certainly feel uncomfortable to have. We need to learn how to manage these symptoms so we can feel more confident and appear more confident for our audience. The very first thing we need to do is we need to greet our anxiety. For most of us, when we begin to feel nervous, that nervousness actually makes us feel even more nervous. So a great way to manage that is simply to accept the anxiety. Give yourself permission to be nervous when you're in front of others. And, in so doing, you acknowledge the fact that this is normal. It's something that most people would experience. Being in front of others is challenging. But because you are committed to what you're saying and you feel passionate. it's okay to feel the anxiety. So in greeting this anxiety, you give yourself a little bit of space, so it doesn't feel like you're swept away. And, in that space, you can do things to manage your symptoms. First, if you feel that heart pounding, take some deep belly breaths. The kind you would take if you were doing yoga, or Tai Chi, or Qi Gong. This slows down your autonomic nervous system and helps your heart return to a normal rate. If you experience what I like to call plumbing reversal, those sweaty palms and brow yet the dry mouth, what you can do to manage that is first suck on a lozenge or chew some gum. Even drinking warm water will reactivate your salivary glands and eradicate that dry mouth. For the perspiration you might feel, that's a result of your body's core temperature rising. It's like you have a fever. A great way to reduce your core temperature is to hold something cold in the palms of your hand. This reduces that core body temperature. Now, you've all experienced this in reverse. On a cold day, if you've ever held warm coffee or tea and felt it warming you up, all we're doing is the opposite. If you find yourself speaking quickly, that's a result of shallow breathing. So again, a deep breath will help. That shallow breathing often leads us to speak very quickly. A good way to slow down your rate is to gesture more broadly. The bigger you gesture, the slower you gesture, the slower your speaking rate is. We tend to sync up our speaking rate and our rate of gesturing, so by slowing down the gestures, you slow down your rate. And finally, if you're somebody who sways and rocks when you get nervous, it probably has to do with your feet position. Many of us, when we stand, we stand like a penguin or a duck with our feet facing to the side. This allows our hips to be open and swaying becomes very natural. We can eradicate that by simply turning our feet so they're parallel underneath our shoulders. This locks our hips in and makes it much more difficult to sway. Taken together, these symptomatic relief techniques, paired with greeting your anxiety, can certainly help you feel more comfortable and confident and absolutely will help your audience see you as more confident.