I personally don’t think anybody enjoys standing in front of a big group of people and talking, especially students. It creeps us out, it makes us so nervous we feel sick, and ultimately we are afraid of being judged negatively by our peers. But is this the actual reason why we get stage fright? Or is there some kind of mechanism that causes these weird sensations in our bodies when we get in front of a big group of other people?

Real quick, what is “stage fright”? Stage fright is the common name for performance anxiety. WebMD describes the sensation of having everyone looking at you initiates body’s “fight or flight” mechanism. Some of the symptoms of performance anxiety include:

-Racing Pulse

-Dry Mouth

-Trembling hands, knees, voice

-Nausea

-Vision Changes

Now that we have a basic understanding of what stage fright encompasses, we can start to try and find what causes it.

Erno Hermans of New York University conducted a study that was published in Science back in 2011. In this study, Erno’s team took 80 healthy adult volunteers and showed them violent fight scenes from films followed by neutral scenes from a different film to cause emotional stress. One group watched the violent clips before the neutral ones, and the other group watched the neutral clips first. They monitored this stress and its effects through the use of an MRI brain scan. The results of the experiment found that on a neurological level, stressors in the brain cause your focus to shift away from whatever it is that you are doing. This explains why stage fright happens and we forget what we are talking about, because we lose focus when our brains are exposed to these stressors.

This study may seem relatively small, 80 volunteer individuals. Seeing as the researchers were using volunteers that may be the reason why they had a smaller pool of research subjects. The information is also fairly new, being published late 2011. It is possible that there is no evidence currently denying these findings either.  But the information here is very credible seeing as it is published in Science. The findings are significant enough to be put into Science so it makes it hard to argue with.

Stage fright is rooted in a sense of reputation. This video from TEDed does a good job of explaining the things we think other people are thinking or saying about us while we speak in public. One great example that applies to all of us is when Andrew pulls our names out of a hat to answer a question in class. The stage fright is actually very clear to see, many people whose names are called in class do not answer. One or two people can use the excuse of they were not in class, but when six people are called with no answer, there are some people afraid to speak up. That is a good example to look at and analyze the social factors such as the large room and amount of people which can be considered possible third variables in making the decision to speak or not.

In conclusion, stage fright is in the mind. It is something that we perceive, and something that we allow to come into existence. There are ways of learning to deal with stage fright, but some people seriously cannot get past the fear. It’s what makes online environments like this blog so appealing to people. The anonymity allows people to be more comfortable and willing to talk about their ideas and thoughts they have everyday.