When your hand shakes or your smile starts to twitch in a conversation, it can feel like everyone around you sees it. In this video, you’ll find out what research shows about how much of your nervousness other people really notice, and why social anxiety makes it feel so much more visible from the inside. You’ll also hear what one group of students was told before a speech, and why it helped them even though they didn’t feel calmer.
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Disclaimer:
This video is for education. It is not medical advice and not a substitute for professional treatment. If you have a diagnosed condition or a history of serious trauma, please work with a qualified professional.
Transcript
You’re talking to someone, and when you smile, the corner of your mouth starts to twitch.
Your hand shakes as you lift your cup, and your whole body feels stiff.
You’re sure that the other person can see all of it.
If that happens to you, nothing is wrong with you. However, the other person sees much less of your nervousness than you think, if they see anything at all.
Researchers have tested this by comparing how nervous people thought they looked with how nervous they looked to the people watching them.
In the next minutes, you’ll find out why your nervousness feels so much stronger to you than it looks to other people.
You’ll also find out what one group of students was told before a speech. This information did not make them feel much calmer.
However, it still helped them, because the people watching thought that their speeches were better.
In my main video about working through social anxiety at home, I described one question that comes up again and again in social situations.
The question is: Can they tell? Can they see it on me?
If this question is with you in many conversations, nothing is wrong with you.
The question makes sense, because the feelings in your body are real, and in these moments they are very strong.
In addition, you cannot see yourself the way the other person sees you.
So you have to guess what the other person sees, and when you feel this nervous, you guess that the other person sees everything.
Researchers wanted to know whether this guess is right. Most people assume that if they feel their nervousness this strongly, other people must see it too.
To test this assumption, researchers asked students to give a short speech to another student.
Afterwards, the speaker and the listener both said how nervous the speaker had looked.
The listeners thought that the speakers looked less nervous than the speakers themselves believed.
The researchers found the same pattern with other feelings that people try to hide. People believe that others can tell how they feel more easily than others really can.
So other people see less of your nervousness than you believe, even when you feel it very strongly.
You might now ask whether this is also true for people with social anxiety.
Researchers have tested the same question with people who have social anxiety.
People with social anxiety and people without social anxiety gave a short speech, and afterwards the speakers and the audience rated each speech.
The audience saw no clear difference between the two groups. However, the people with social anxiety rated their own speech much worse than the audience did.
A newer study compared speakers with a lot of fear of public speaking and speakers with little fear.
All speakers rated themselves worse than the audience did, and the speakers with a lot of fear did this more strongly than the speakers with little fear.
Many studies have found the same result: anxious speakers rate themselves worse than the audience does.
So when you have social anxiety, you judge yourself more harshly than the people who watch you.
This leads to the question of why you see yourself so differently from how other people see you.
One common answer is that your body simply reacts much more strongly than the body of a less anxious person.
To test this answer, researchers asked women with a lot of social anxiety and women with little social anxiety to give a short speech.
The anxious women felt a stronger heartbeat, stronger blushing, wetter hands and more difficulty breathing.
At the same time, machines measured the heartbeat, the blushing, the sweating and the breathing of every woman.
However, the machines found no clear difference between the two groups.
If you blush easily, the same is true for blushing. In another study, women watched a video of themselves singing while two men were in the room.
Machines showed that the women with a strong fear of blushing became just as red as the women with a weak fear of blushing.
However, the women with a strong fear of blushing felt their blushing more strongly.
So in both studies, the anxious people felt their body reactions more strongly, although their bodies did not react clearly more strongly.
This is the first part of the answer to why your nervousness feels so much stronger to you than it looks to others.
You feel your heartbeat, the heat in your face and the tension in your muscles from the inside.
The other person cannot feel any of this, because the other person only sees what shows on the outside.
The second part of the answer has to do with your attention.
In a study with adults who were afraid of public speaking, the more strongly a speaker felt his or her body and paid attention to himself or herself, the worse that speaker rated the speech compared with the audience.
However, how strongly the body really reacted, as measured by machines, had nothing to do with how harshly the speakers judged themselves.
Attention has this effect because it makes small things seem big.
When your attention stays on yourself, you notice every small change in your face, your voice and your body, and so these small changes seem big to you.
The other person is busy with the conversation, so the attention of the other person is not only on you.
At the beginning, I promised to explain why your nervousness feels so much stronger to you than it looks to others.
So this is the complete answer: you feel your body from the inside, and your attention stays on yourself.
I want to tell you how this was for me. I never had a problem with blushing, so I can only tell you about the other signs.
When I still had social anxiety, my hands shook, my body went stiff in conversations, and the corner of my mouth twitched when I smiled.
I also had panic attacks on several occasions while other people were around me.
Every time, I was sure that everyone could see what was happening inside me.
However, in all those years, not one person ever said anything to me about it. Nobody asked me why my hands were shaking, and nobody asked me if I was okay.
Of course, this does not prove that nobody noticed anything. However, if my shaking hands and my stiff body had been as obvious as they felt to me, I think at least one person would have asked about it.
And even if someone does see that you are nervous, how would that person judge you? The common assumption is that the person would think badly of you.
Researchers have tested this assumption with people who had an embarrassing moment in front of others, for example a small accident.
These people expected the others to judge them more harshly than the others really did.
One reason is that the person looks only at the embarrassing moment.
The others, however, judge the person by everything else they know about him or her.
In another study, people read about someone who had an embarrassing accident and then saw a photo of that person.
When the person in the photo had a red face after the accident, most people found the person more likeable and more trustworthy.
So when other people see your nervousness, they judge you more kindly than you expect.
You see only the one moment in which you felt nervous, and the other person sees this moment together with everything else about you.
At the beginning, I promised to tell you what one group of students was told before a speech.
These students were told: Your nervousness is much harder to see than you think.
This information did not make the students feel much calmer. However, it still helped them.
They thought that their own speech had gone better, and the people watching also thought that their speeches were better.
Other students were only told: Nervousness is normal, so don’t worry. This did not help them.
So the students did not need to feel calm to give a better speech. Knowing that other people see much less of their nervousness than they think was enough to help them.
You now have the same explanation that helped these students, and you also know why it is true.
Remember the conversation from the beginning, with the twitch at the corner of your mouth and your hand shaking as you lifted your cup?
The other person most likely saw much less of your nervousness than you felt.
This is also the answer to the question from my main video, which was: Can they tell? Can they see it on me?
The answer is that other people see much less than you think. What you learned today can help you in the moment.
When you feel your hand shake, you can remember that the other person sees much less of your nervousness than you feel.
However, this knowledge does not change why your body reacts so strongly in the first place.
The feeling of being watched comes from old experiences, and your body still reacts to them as if they were happening right now.
In my main video, Working Through Social Anxiety at Home, I show you a method that you can use at home to reduce the strong feelings that are connected to those old experiences.
You prepare your body at home first, so that social situations can feel calmer later on.
You can find that video right here.
Thank you for listening, and take care.