Talking can be stressful – especially if you feel you have something important to say. Social anxiety – the most common form of anxiety – causes most people, at some point in their lives, to be afraid of speaking in public, or even aloud at all.
But, ironically, the best way to deal with this fear is to make yourself speak, rather than avoiding it.
As a neuroscientist who studies how humans communicate, I’ve always tuned into how we form emotional connections with our voices – and how hard that can sometimes feel.
One of my earliest memories is hearing that my dad was asked to speak at a work dinner… but that after exactly seven words, he became overwhelmed and dried up completely.
I can still recall his response: an agonising few days of him emitting near-screams at each reminder of the event, before he finally snapped and joined a local public speaking club. He was determined to never let it happen again – and it never has.
But his experience stuck with me. I was determined to find out: why is talking so important, and why can it be so stressful? And, more importantly, how can you make it easier?
One reason speaking can feel so high-stakes is that it’s inherently social. We’re not just producing words – we’re trying to shape them so they land with another person.
As my colleague Dr Sophie Meekings and I have pointed out, speech is fundamentally designed for interaction, not for talking to ourselves. That means every word is up for judgment: it’s not just what we say, but how we say it – and how it’s received.
However, as my dad’s experience proves, there are strategies we can use to get our point across better.
Here’s are the six most effective ones my research has uncovered.
1. Choose your position
Eye contact is very important for humans. As research from the University of East Anglia has found, we use it to establish connections, for emphasis and to indicate the subject of our speech.
So it might seem obvious that being face-to-face for a conversation would make that conversation easier. But, in reality, face-to-face conversations are often part of the problem.
When someone maintains eye contact with you, it likely increases your self-awareness. One study by scientists in France even showed that participants were more accurate in their assessment of their physiological responses (such as skin sensitivity) with increased eye contact.
As helpful as that sounds, it can have negative impacts. We’ve all had the experience of doing things worse when we know we are being watched, and there’s empirical evidence that this is actually the case.
Instead, people often prefer to have conversations side-by-side – whether in the pub, walking together or seated in the front of a car. It can make an interaction feel less pressured, and your listener feels less self-conscious.
There is a time and place for direct eye contact. Apart from anything else, it’s easier to know if you are keeping someone’s attention – but if you have hearing issues or you’re in a noisy room, seeing someone’s face will make their speech easier to understand.
Above all, try to make sure that when you want to get your message across, you do it in person.
A lot of what goes on in a conversation involves the speaker and listener aligning their voices and behaviour, such that scientists think we even start to speak with similar breathing patterns, rhythms and speech melody – mirroring each other’s gestures, words and pronunciations.
Recently, psychologists from Lancaster University have suggested that this mirroring creates a complex act of social collaboration that we actively choose to take part in.
When we text or call each other, we miss the benefits of these alignments, as we simply have much less information about the people we are talking to.
2. Change your pace (but not your voice)
If you have a different accent from people around you, it can feel daunting to speak in public for fear of being misunderstood. In reality, though, our brains can cope with a wide range of different ways of speaking.
So don’t worry about your accent. What you can focus on, though, is your clarity. One thing many of us are guilty of is speaking too fast, making our speech less clear and harder to follow.
That’s because when we speak quickly, we reduce the amount of information in the sound of our speech.
Our brains are also tuned into all the other information a voice carries besides the words, as several of my studies have shown. Clues about the speaker’s identity, for example – as well as the music of their voice (the melody and rhythm), and also their emotional state.
The sentence ‘you scared me’ means something very different if the speaker sounds amused, terrified, or angry.
When we speak quickly, we reduce that important information that helps us build connections and understanding. Vowel sounds in particular suffer from this shortening, and it directly affects how intelligible our speech is to a listener.
An interesting study from 2013 showed that people produce much more intelligible speech, including vowel sounds, if instructed to speak ‘as if’ they were talking to someone who had hearing difficulties than when they were producing fast, conversational speech.
It showed that you don’t need training to speak more clearly, just intention.
In an attempt to develop my own speaking skills and deal with anxiety about speaking, I took myself off to New York for a week and did an open mic comedy night every night.
Very aware that I tend to rush my speech when I’m nervous, I consciously slowed my speech and tried to make my vowel sounds clearer. While it’s hard to know for definite how successful I was, I did get a lot of laughs!
While I’m not suggesting you need to zip off and sign up for your local comedy show, putting yourself in an unfamiliar setting is a great way to practise clearer speaking for better connections with your listener.
Read more:
- The one conversation all couples need to have about cheating, according to a psychologist
- How to spot the hidden sociopaths in your life
- Why some people are far easier to gaslight than others
3. Be expressive
Humans have unusually expressive faces. We have roughly 30 muscles on each side of our faces, which are used for chewing, talking and communication – including expressing emotions, emphasis, acknowledgement and reactions.
Some of these are highly unconscious. Scientists have shown, for example, that humans perform a very brief eyebrow ‘flash’, a raising of the eyebrows that lasts about 200 milliseconds, when they see someone they know.
It’s a kind of non-verbal ‘hello’, often accompanied by a smile that’s very hard to produce deliberately in a convincing manner.
But we do have a great deal of control over our expressions, and these – along with our tone of voice – can really help your message come alive.
And the effect is even greater if your facial expressions and tone carry warmth or positivity, making you seem more approachable. Though, again, it helps if you actually are happy.
To make it easier, try to enjoy the conversation and don’t hold back from the level of expressiveness you’re comfortable with.
Contrary to what you may think, you’ll go more wrong if you try to suppress your expressions than if you exaggerate them. A 2024 study by psychologists in the US asked participants to talk to strangers, either amplifying their expressions or suppressing them as instructed.
The listeners, the researchers found, responded negatively when people tried to suppress their emotions – in fact, the suppressors were even considered to be less likeable.
What’s interesting is that these speakers felt less authentic compared to the amplifiers, even though both were acting out of their comfort zone.
The researchers concluded that expressive suppression has interpersonal costs that act as a barrier to forming relationships. So, if in doubt, lay it on thick.
4. Have a laugh
One way to infuse your interactions with positivity is through laughter. It’s an area I’ve focused on in my research, and I’ve shown with my colleagues that it’s primarily a social behaviour.
We’re 30 times more likely to laugh if someone else is around than when we’re alone. It seems to function as a playful, affiliative signal.
Of course, it’s not always appropriate, but used at the right time it can be an effective way of putting people at ease. It’s a sign of confidence and informality, breaking the ice in new social situations.
And, if people are laughing, it can increase your sense of social bonding as well as intimacy – ultimately helping you to communicate better.
In randomised controlled trials, the psychologist and anthropologist Prof Robin Dunbar has shown that if you can get people laughing, they’re more likely to disclose more about themselves.
In my own work, I’ve found that laughter can also be a way of getting people to engage with ideas that might be more uncomfortable or difficult to broach.
You don’t have to be a comedian – most laughter has nothing to do with jokes – but a playful tone can boost affiliation, and therefore trust and engagement. Be careful about taking it too far, though, since aggressive humour can have negative effects on relationships.
5. Tell stories
Don’t just give people unconnected facts – tell them a story. Back in 1972, scientists in the US showed that participants understood information better if they were given it in a structured, familiar narrative.
What’s more, they even formed stronger memories when tested on the information.
Indeed, we even seem to encode our memories in a way that resembles story structures we’re familiar with.
In a more recent study, University of Sussex researchers played people videos of everyday events from television clips, showing participants either the whole event (for example, an athlete diving into water) or an incomplete event (the diver preparing themself to dive).
In a memory test a week later, they found that participants were filling in the ends of incomplete events, giving them an ending that they’d not originally seen.
What this means is that if you tell stories with a connected narrative structure, people will both focus more on what you’re saying and remember it too.
This works particularly well if you’re trying to communicate tricky concepts – the physicist Richard Feynman was an expert at using stories and analogies to express complex ideas about energy and the Universe.
When you’re talking, try to find the relatable elements to your message, with real-life examples and stories.
6. Adapt to groups
Conversations change as the number of people changes. The minimum number of people in a conversation is (obviously) two, but, as Dunbar argued in 1997, there’s a limit at the other end.
The maximum number who can truly share a conversation? Just four.
Any group larger than this, and the conversation is likely to split into two. This is likely because it’s hard to manage the different ‘turns’ in the conversation (in other words, who speaks next), a process that requires paying attention both to who’s speaking and who wants to speak.
As you’ve likely experienced yourself, this is pretty hard to do when there’s a whole crowd around a table.
But it’s also because we struggle to develop a ‘theory of mind’ for more than three other people at once, which is our ability to track what others might be thinking.
In another study by Dunbar’s lab, scientists analysed conversations in which people were gossiping about an absent person compared to other kinds of conversation.
They thought that, since gossipers also need to form a mental model of the person being gossiped about, these conversations may have reduced participants.
They were right: gossip groups tended to have three or fewer people in them, rather than the typical four. It may be that four ‘items’ is just a natural limit for human cognition – the number’s been noted elsewhere as a constraint on working memory.
Either way, once a fifth person joins, the conversation will likely split.
But cognitive limits aren’t the only constraint on interactions – environmental ones matter too. Background noise interferes with how we process speech, making larger groups particularly difficult to follow.
This effect is amplified in older adults, as age-related hearing changes make speech harder to pick out from noise.
The key in such settings is to make sure people can see your face. Facing people is likely to improve intelligibility, and your listeners will be grateful when you slow down your speech and make your vowels clearer.
Being heard, after all, isn’t just about what you say – it’s about making it easy for others to follow. Slow down, focus on your vowels, and your message is far more likely to land.
Read more:
