Overcoming Public Speaking Anxiety Breathing Exercises.

Overcoming public speaking anxiety breathing exercises will effectively, simply and quickly ease your tension. They release fear, lower stress levels AND enhance your speaking voice.

Anxiety makes us 'up-tight' in more ways than one.

If you're familiar with the expression you'll know it generally applies to 'being snappy' or 'short tempered'. But being up-tight is not only the temporary absence of our usually relaxed easy-going selves. It is also what literally happens physically

Under stress we tighten our muscles and HOLD the tension we're feeling.

It locks itself into our bodies. The cumulative effect of long term unreleased tension can be varying forms of debilitating and often serious illnesses.

One of the first places tension shows is in our breathing patterns. Anxiety makes us breathe more quickly and less deeply.

The result is the body perceives itself as being under threat and the automatic primitive survival mechanism fight or flight response takes over.

The physiological effects of anxiety include:

• breathing off the tops of our lungs which in turn gives rise to:
• less oxygen circulating in our system
• a build up of carbon monoxide (because it's not being released through full exhaling)
• and in some people, panic attacks or hyperventilation

The direct consequence of anxiety on the quality of your voice is losing control of pitch and tone.

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Shallow breathing means you restrict the fullness of sound and range your voice might have. It will sound squeezed or strained because you are talking off the top of your lungs with a tight throat, jaw, mouth and face.

Forcing your voice to over-ride the restrictions is not an answer. It causes damage ranging from resonably mild inconveniences like a sore throat to serious problems requiring surgical intervention.

Consistently being fearful and therefore breathing shallowly can become a vicious cycle.

The less air we take in, the worse we feel and the less effectively we speak. The less effectively we speak, the worse we feel, and the less air we take in.

The only way to break the cycle is to learn and use good breathing habits. If this is you, try these overcoming public speaking anxiety breathing exercises.

Overcoming Public Speaking Anxiety Breathing Exercises

To get the best from these exercises give yourself unhurried time and wear loose comfortable clothing.

Exercise One:

• Stand with your feet a comfortable shoulder width apart.
• Support the weight of your body through your hips and legs rather than locking your knees.
• Consciously release and relax your shoulders.
• If you're holding your stomach in, let it go.
• Place your hands on your stomach.
• Breathe in through your nose to the count of four. Count slowly. As you inhale feel your diaphragm rising.

Totally Panic Stricken? Literally and truly paralysed by fear? If that's you and you know what you're experiencing is beyond normal manageable anxiety check out Barry Joe McDonagh's article on Public Speaking Panic Attacks. There is hope and there are solutions.

• Breathe out through your mouth to the count of four and now feel your diaphragm expanding.
• Do several rounds of inhale and exhale to a four count while making sure you keep your shoulders, stomach and legs relaxed.
• Once you have mastered the four count, increase it. Through regular practice you will soon be able to extend it for a eight or even ten count. By then you will be feeling the direct benefit of these overcoming public speaking anxiety breathing exercises! You will be relaxed, alert and ready.

Overcoming Public Speaking Anxiety Breathing Exercises
Variations on Exercise One:

• Lie on the floor or sit in a chair.
  (Either way, make sure your legs are uncrossed.)
• Use the outbreath to hum quietly.
  Increase the intensity and volume as you go through your rounds.
• Use the outbreath to sound each of the vowel sounds in turn.
  Let each go without force, flowing smoothly from your relaxed throat.
  
  For example:
  
  'A' is going to become ahhhhhhh... as in 'are'
  'E' is Eeeeeeeeeeeee... as in 'easy'
  'I' is Iiiiiiii... as in 'eye'
  'O' is Ooooooo...as in 'Oh'
  'U' is Uuuuuuuu...as in 'you'
  
  Feel the shape of the sound in your mouth and enjoy its resonance.
• Use imagery by adding color.
  Imagine your inbreath as a light, energy intensive color washing through all the cells in your body from the top of your head to your toes.
  Imagine your outbreath as clearing away all the debris and dross.
• Imagine the inbreath coming from deep within the earth.
  Send it traveling through all your limbs and organs to the top of your head carrying its life giving and grounding forces with it.
• Use imagery by adding pictures of yourself achieving all that you want to in your speech.
  See yourself competent, smiling and confident. See the audience enjoying your talk.

Overcoming Public Speaking Anxiety Breathing Exercises - Exercise Two:

• Stand with your feet a comfortable shoulder width apart.
• Support the weight of your body through your hips and legs rather than locking your knees.
• Consciously release and relax your shoulders.
• If you're holding your stomach in, let it go.
• Bring your palms together in the centre of your chest.
• As you slowly inhale through your nose, keeping the palms of your hands together, raise your arms as high as you can above your head. At the same time raise yourself on to your toes.
• Hold your breath briefly at the top of your inhale keeping yourself fully stretched and pushing without strain toward to the sky.
• Exhale slowly through your mouth while keeping your arms fully extended. Bring them down and round back up to your chest, palms together in the starting position. At the same time slowly lower your feet.
• Repeat for ten rounds.
• You can use this exercise for breath counting as well. It has the same positive effects as the first exercise with the addition of gentle full body stretching.

• Sitting
  Sit straight in your chair with legs uncrossed and both feet on the floor. Do the palm to palm hands, arm extension and raising as above.
• Use any of the imagery or sounding suggestions from Exercise One above.

Just so you know:-

I've used this exercise with drama classes during rehearsal and prior to performances. It's made an enormous difference to the overall quality of work as it centers, concentrates and calms.

I also use it for myself whenever I catch myself getting tense. It takes very little time and can be shortened to a mere two rounds if need be.

The benefits of both these overcoming public speaking anxiety breathing exercises are immediate; pyschologically and physically.

Physiologically you are using all of your lungs rather than the top third and have more oxygen in your system.

An additional benefit is you are strengthening your physical capacity to speak for a longer time, to deal with more complex patterns of language effectively and you won't need to break for breath as frequently.

Make overcoming public speaking anxiety breathing exercises a part of your daily voice warm-up routine. Yep, they're good for you!

NB:
If you haven't looked at the pages on rate of speech, how fast the words come out of your mouth, and the use of pauses in speaking, do so.

These overcoming public speaking anxiety breathing exercises coupled with the exercises for rate and use of pauses will help the quality of your delivery considerably.
AND when you're done with those, there's pages on developing vocal variety, understanding basic body language and fantastic diction exercises as well!

If you've arrived here at 'overcoming public speaking anxiety breathing exercises' looking for ways to help a child, please take a look at my page on 'how to build confidence in a child'.

You'll find suggestions and activities to enhance and foster self esteem suitable for children from kindergarten to approx. 8-9 yrs. old. They're able to be easily adapted for children outside those age ranges too. Although not a quick-fix, they will, with practice, over time really benefit your child.

Be sure to teach a child these overcoming public speaking anxiety breathing exercises too. They will understand particularly if you show and do them with them. I know because I've used them with children. They are effective, even with very young ones.

If you would like more than these overcoming public speaking anxiety exercises to help either yourself, a child or a friend, please look at the page on Acute Anxiety Help or this one on dealing with Public Speaking Nerves You'll find many more suggestions there.

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