Phobias and other irrational anxieties

[-elfearz-]

Good luck RÃ*an! I'm sure you'll be just fine.

I'd drag out the old advice about imagining the audience naked, but that usually scares me more than the whole public speaking thing

[Rían]

Lol

[Nurvingiel]

Originally Posted by RÃ*an

Whew, very few people aren't!!!

I'm speaking to 100+ women tomorrow at our church ... I get so nervous when I do that, my jaw shakes and I feel cold and shaky - but they say I don't look nervous ... *gets cold just thinking about it...*

I bet you really don't look nervous! We are much more aware of what's going on with our bodies (shaky voice etc.) than our listeners are.

I feel nervous and shaky voiced, but the last time I gave a presentation I got a great mark and did well. My only faults were speaking too quietly (probably more due to lack of sleep than nervousness), and speaking too quickly. Speaking quickly is something I do when I'm nervous.

If you speak too fast too, concentrate on speaking 1/3 slower than normal. Your audience will hear a calm, not too slow, easy to understand speach. I have never, ever heard someone speak too slowly in a speech.

My last bit of unsolicited advice is don't worry too much about the audience. If you drop your notes, no one is really going to judge, instead, they all feel your pain because they are just as nervous speaking in public as you are. If you goof up or forget part of your talk, just carry on, and the incident will be forgotten by the end of the talk.

You don't have to be perfect up there, but I'm sure you'll do a great job!

(Have you done it already? How'd it go?)

[Rían]

Originally Posted by Nurvingiel

I bet you really don't look nervous! We are much more aware of what's going on with our bodies (shaky voice etc.) than our listeners are.

Yes, I think you're right

If you speak too fast too, concentrate on speaking 1/3 slower than normal. Your audience will hear a calm, not too slow, easy to understand speach. I have never, ever heard someone speak too slowly in a speech.

Yeah, that's a good reminder - I imagine we all speed up when we're nervous!

You don't have to be perfect up there, but I'm sure you'll do a great job!

(Have you done it already? How'd it go?)

thanks, and it's Tuesday morning...

[Lotesse]

[Rían]

oh, that is hysterical, Lotesse!!!!! That made me laugh!

(ps - Nurvs - talk went well - I thought of you and slowed down a few times )

[Lotesse]

Glad U liked it, Rian! Yeah, that'd really freak me out to see that in my rearview on the freeway. Back in my uber-paranoid days, if I thought about it I could actually psyche myself and my imagination into seeing something like this and thinking it was real. Paranoia + Creative Imagination = seeing a jet in your rearview!

[Lief Erikson]

That was good.

[Rían]

I remember once driving home from Uni (about a 4 hour trip) late at night and VERY tired; I invented a game that all the cars I saw were actually spies out to get me - the adrenaline kept me awake. There were very few cars on the road, so I was constantly checking my mirrors, and if they were ahead of me, I'd slow down a bit, etc. It was really freaky how scared I got, but it kept me alert and awake.

(and they didn't get me - haHA!)

(your pic reminded me of that for some reason)

[Tessar]

I worry about you people some times.

Then I realize I'm just as crazy. HAH! .

[Spock]

Actually Rian that is an excellent phobia to have. This, especially for a woman driving alone. I used to conduct womens self-defense courses and this was always on the list of things to be aware of. Keep on checking those mirrors.

[Rían]

good tip, Spock - thanks! I always thought that if I was driving alone at night and a cop came up behind me, that I would NOT pull over until I was with other people (like at a gas station) - I would put on my emergency blinkers to show I saw him, etc., but would NOT stop until there were other people around. There's been some fake cops around ...

[Spock]

Yep, two fake police officers were arrested just the other day, I forget where. You have the right idea about not stopping until a populated place; even more so if the car isn't marked and just has the revolving light on the dash board. Stay safe.

[Bombadillo]

I can't believe I've never seen this thread before.

I'm slightly afraid of public speaking, but what I'm scared of most is freaky animals that just stare at you. And it's laughable because I bet everyone's thought of this as a cheesy horror film scene before, but just picture some little animal staring at you, and it won't stop. You start to think "something's wrong," then "OMG, what is it doing?" and then "@*$% there's something wrong with this thing get me away from it."

Whenever I see something like that, I try to scare the animal just to get it to turn around and run away instead of looking at me, and if that doesn't work then it's a really creepy animal who doesn't understand human superiority, so I get myself away from it or have someone hit ot for me if they're nearby. For real.

But at least I think I know why: my aunt and uncle used to have a cat that some punk shot with a BB gun, which left it in a permanantly POed state. It would literally start trouble. One Thanksgiving when I was about five or six, it was clawing at people's ankles and necks as they sat in the living room, and it tried to eat my grandpa as he stepped over it while carrying the turkey (it would pretend to be asleep on the floor until someone would come near it, and then it would attack, and not in any playful, cat-like, tassle-swatting way), so they threw it in the basement, where I was playing with the trainset all by my defenseless self.

I was familiar with this cat already, and already hated it worse than death, so I tried to get out of the basement but it just wouldn't move from the top step. It sat there and stared at me, hard, for over twenty minutes, while I was screaming all the while for some adult to come it get it out of my way or kill it or something but the party was too loud upstairs, and so I just stayed there panicking. If I stepped any closer to it, it would have tried to kill me, and being that young I probably would have been shredded to a bloody mess.

I was right to think that too, because I'm not exaggerating anything here. The vet pressed my aunt and uncle to have it put down, but they wouldn't listen. Last year it died and I was so glad, you can't even know. Here's the first time I mention its name without some vulgar adjective before it: Finian. *shudder*

Luckily that's not anything I have to face every day.

Lotesse, how do you find the perfect picture for every thread? Do you know the Far Side panel where the hunter is standing at the edge of a forest, facing the trees, and the forest floor is just packed with squirrels and chipmunks standing upright and looking at him with gaping eyes? The caption ran to the effect of "suddenly Jim, a lifelong lover of the outdoors, became very uneasy with nature."

[Nurvingiel]

Originally Posted by RÃ*an

oh, that is hysterical, Lotesse!!!!! That made me laugh!

(ps - Nurvs - talk went well - I thought of you and slowed down a few times )

Yeah, this hilarious Lotesse! Lulz

I'm glad your talk went well RÃ*, and that I was able to help! I bet it was a rad talk.

You know what I'm afraid of Bombadillo? Paragraphs on the internet with more than 10 lines. Eyes... unfocusing.


I think this thread is awesome. There's some really neat discussion in here. But I also think we're really abusing the word "phobia". This poor word is often abused in our society. For example, if RÃ*an really did have a phobia of fake cops, she might be unable to drive!

A phobic individual is gripped by paralyzing neurochemical mechanisms that render advice like "feel the fear and do it anyway" totally irrelevant. Nor does it help to tell a phobic person to take a Valium and wash it down with serveral in-flight cocktails while repeating to herself that flying is safer than driving.

People often use the word "phobic" to describe ordinary fear and trembling. "I'm phobic about flying," a client told me just this morning. He's a white-knuckle flyer who feels an adrenelaine rush when the pilot announces that he's putting the seat-belt sign on because he anticipates some choppy air. My client hates takeoff and landing, and he gets a mildly upset stomach whenever he flies. He also tortures himself with a certain amount of preflight catastrophic thinking. But he doesn't have a phobic reaction to flying. If he did, he wouldn't be able to board a plane in the first place.

If you or someone you know has a phobia, the good news is it can be treated and overcome. This is especially true if you have a specific phobia, thought help is also available for panic attacks that strike for no apparent reason, and for social phobias involving a paralyzing fear of social or work interactions. Treatment is important because avoidance won't work - in fact, it makes things considerably worse. Research demonstrates that the harder phobics work to avoid the things they fear, the more their brains grow convinced that the threat is real.

Excerpted from "Fear and Other Uninvited Guests" by Dr. Harriet Lerner (p. 29-30)

[Rían]

yeah, the fake cop thing was not a phobia at all - it was just a story that came out of Lotesse's funny picture.

As far as phobias, I do have a spider phobia which has improved since I had kids and had to smush spiders for them.

[Lief Erikson]

Originally Posted by RÃ*an

As far as phobias, I do have a spider phobia which has improved since I had kids and had to smush spiders for them.

Most of my family has phobias about creatures like crickets, cockroaches and spiders. I have no phobia whatsoever about crickets; I squash them with my bare hands routinely, and urge others to do so as well. With cockroaches and spiders, I've been a bit more antsy, but I'm trying to get over that. A couple weeks ago, I carried a largish spider out (and not one of these silly daddy-long-legs) of the house in my hands. So that was good for my morale. I'm very embarrassed about being a bit nervous around cockroaches. I should be smashing them with my hands by now, and I will try to conquer my nerves, next time I see one.

[Bombadillo]

Crickets!? But they're not even pests! They're the sound of the countryside! I used to try to catch them as a little kid on a small, lakeside beach in the Poconos with my brothers and cousins. They had been put there to get rid of all the fire ants.

You're evil!

( )

I don't kill bugs unless they're super creepy, like roaches, mean-looking spiders (not dady-long-legs), and centipedes or millipedes.

Rian, I read some of the posts in this big thread last night, and when I was out driving around today, looking for Christmas presents, not finding any, and getting bored and half-lost, I tried pretending all the other drivers were spies. That does really work.

Originally Posted by Nurvingiel

You know what I'm afraid of Bombadillo? Paragraphs on the internet with more than 10 lines. Eyes... unfocusing.

LOL! Yeah. You're right. I guess I'll fix it.

[Rían]

Bomb - it sure worked with me! I tell ya, I got myself WIDE awake! Glad to have given you a helpful keep-awake-while-driving tip

Lief - we catch crickets and feed them to our gecko! Spiders and cockroaches get smushed. Crickets are fine - OUTSIDE. Inside, they drive you INSANE if there's one in your room!

[Lief Erikson]

Originally Posted by RÃ*an

Crickets are fine - OUTSIDE.

Agreed.

Originally Posted by RÃ*an

Inside, they drive you INSANE if there's one in your room!

Several of my family members feel that way. As for myself, I can usually tune crickets out. However, I kill them for family cool points . Also, I certainly don't fancy the idea of a colony of crickets living in our house. That has happened before, once or twice. So keeping their population numbers as low as possible is quite good for our family well-being.

Note: I realize I sounded quite absurd as I said that last sentence .