Ask HN: How did you get rid of your performance anxiety?

[deluxefeeling]

I'm a software engineer who has struggled massively with performance and presentation anxiety for the past ten years. This was the result of a presentation gone horribly wrong in my first couple of years in the workplace. I suffered my first ever panic attack mid-speech and had to flee the room.

As a consequence, this issue has been in the back of my mind (and potentially the front of my sub-conscious) ever since. I've gradually shifted as far away from management positions as possible, and tried to avoid roles at work that would require me to speak or perform in any nature. I'm terrified of panic arising mid-speech, turning me into a wreck before any presentations. This has begun to spill over into social events, parties, networking meetups, or anything else remotely performative in nature.

The worst part about this is that I was actually quite a natural speaker prior to this anxiety arising, and was often complimented on my speaking ability.

I've tried all sorts of techniques to fix this. Some work better than others - beta blockers help a lot, as does alcohol. Obviously, I don't want to become overly reliant on booze or anything stronger than propranalol, but sometimes the immediate relief feels necessary. Exposure therapy like Toastmasters seems to provide big short-term gains, but the effects fade fairly quickly, and if I don't do it for a few weeks I'm back where I started.

Please share any suggestions! I'd love to hear your own stories.

[sillysaurusx]

One thing that helped me was just to get older. By 30 I started not to care what people thought of me.

I still have the anxiety, but it's easier to manage. One tip is grounding. Try to distract yourself.

Sleep helps. I find that anxiety from yesterday goes away by tomorrow.

Another is to focus on something you like. It's hard in a workplace setting, but often there's something that you like more than the job itself. It helps (me) to concentrate fully on that.

Just remember that there's not something "wrong" with you. Most people just don't talk about this. I once had a panic attack during an interview phone screen about 7 years ago, and interviews weren't very fun after that.

An understanding manager helps. You could do presentations in written form rather than on stage or verbally. For standups, just keep it brief.

[pfannkuchen]

Did you happen to get a lot more senior by the time you stopped caring what people think? It’s quite a bit easier to not care what people think when you’re the one evaluating them and not the other way around for most of the audience. This may not be the cause for you, just curious as there does tend to be a correlation between age and role seniority.

[kashunstva]

I’m in a different discipline (classical music performance) where the demand for perfection is omnipresent; so as with you, performance anxiety is commonplace. I strongly recommend “The Confident Mind” by Nate Zinsser, PhD.

The book is difficult to summarize succinctly but it addresses a systematic approach to building confidence both in terms of a background mental state and in terms of execution. The methodology involves constantly mining the past and present for positive material to build a “bank account” of these moments. One exercise that I find helpful is the ESP journal (Effort, Success, Progress) It’s a structured daily journal done in bullet format that links up honest skill-building effort to observable progress and then success, however narrow. Other parts of the method involve detailed visualization exercises.

He also talks about the immediate pre-performance routine that you can run through, CBA. C = Cue your mantra (“I’ve got this. Time to shine.) B = Breathe deeply into the body. A = Attach your attention. CBA. I find the attention part the most helpful. The anxious mind spins off into every unproductive direction imaginable. By consciously deciding to focus the mind to a particular element of the performance you can help prevent that. In music it would be something like the decision to focus only on the attack of each note. In standup presentations, sometimes else, vocal quality, the sense of groundedness in my feet, etc.

He also has a chapter on post-performance review. Unsurprisingly, it’s about letting in only positive aspects. There’s a role for taking an honest look at what can be done to work on skills; but it’s all cast in the light of positivity. Much of confident performance is about deluding oneself into that state…

Sorry this is a little scattered; it’s from memory. I’ve recommended the book to many students and colleagues.

[sizzlordy]

Highly recommend practising some stoicism my good person.

You can control: 1. Your actions and reactions 2. Your desires 3. Your character 4. How you treat others

Everything else is outside your control and not worth worrying about.

Do you need to speak or perform? Is the audiences reaction to your performance within your control? No. Are the audiences opinion of you as a person within your control? No.

Is your anxiety within your control? Partially. Is preparing a good speech or performance within your control? Yes Is your character and how you present yourself within your control? Yes. Do you present well? Speak well? Are person of good character worth listening to? Do you treat others well and with respect?

Prepare and perform the best you can, be of good character and treat others well and anything outside of that is not in your control and not worth worry about.

[dt3ft]

I’d argue against having no control of how others react/percieve you.

Perform well - others will most likely think highly of you.

Perform poorly - you’re getting fired.

Stoicism should be taken with a grain of salt.

[newscracker]

It's easy to give some generic advice, which may or may not help. Becoming an "expert" (knowing something well, not intended to mean knowing more than the audience) can increase your confidence. The tangential aspect is dealing with "impostor syndrome", which will work against you.

For presentations, there are books and videos to learn from. But what matters is practice, which can be done in safer spaces and smaller groups.

Lastly, this sentence in Steve Jobs's commencement speech at Stanford in 2005 [1] could help:

> "Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose."

Realizing that everything is impermanent, and that whatever you think or others think today may not stay around in a decade or few from now, also helps. It is ok not to be good at presentations or speaking to an audience. Not everyone is cut out to be a great speaker or a good presenter. Focus on your strengths and derive satisfaction from those. Frame this or keep this around in some form: "This too shall pass".

[1]: https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/steve-jobs-stanford-com...

[Quinzel]

I can sympathise with this, unfortunately I have no helpful suggestions! I used to have no problems doing presentations and in the last year I ended up having to do a few for my masters mainly over zoom (or teams and google meets), and I have no idea why, but doing online presentations causes me a proper fight or flight response where I feel like I’m going to pass out. A couple of weeks ago, I had to do another presentation at work, again via zoom because it was to not just the people at my workplace - but across our entire network and I felt breathless the whole time and an impending sense of doom and afterwards I felt light headed and dizzy for a while. I had panic attacks as a kid, and grew out of them. Then they’ve made a comeback triggered only by zoom (and other video call technology). It’s super weird. With the number of presentations I’ve had to do, I’d have thought I’d have got used to it, but it just gets worse.

[thowfaraway]

Get Propranolol - miracle drug. Totally takes the anxiety out of presentations. I used it a couple times at large presentations, and it was really helpful. Since then I don't need it. Once you go through presentations a few times successfully, you learn it isn't that big a deal.

You feel 99% normal when you take it; it is not a sedative. It is just that the fear doesn't arise, the wave of panic never comes.

https://www.drugs.com/comments/propranolol/for-performance-a...

[c420]

Beta blockers are incredibly subtle for how effective they are. Just be prepared for some intense dreams.

[dt3ft]

Try performing better than anyone else in your team for a week or two. Notice how nobody cares about your amazing performance, go back to your usual performance level. Anxiety should be gone at this point.

[badpun]

Just keep doing it, preferably in low-stakes settings (short presentations on non-important matters, ideally to people who you know). It's a matter of practice.

Also, for some people, performance anxiety does not go away but at best can be managed. Even professional theatre actors can be nervous to the point of throwing up right before going on stage. People suffer through it because of their ambition - it's practically a requirement for being in management. You need to decide for yourself if career advancement is worth the pain it causes you - some people enjoy the challenge and the pain, some prefer more chill life.

Also, my suspicion is that a main cause of stage fright is that it puts your internal self fully exposed in front of people. In the context of a presentation in a tech company, the presentation is basically a direct transmission (from your brain) of your understanding of the problem you're presenting on. Perfectionists and people who worry a lot can often be frightened by the fact that the presentation will expose their shallow understanding of the subject - in a presentation you're basically streaming in real-time, so there's no time to edit and cover up your weak spots etc. Obviously, the best recipe for that is to have the presentation prepared and practiced beforehand, right down to every couple of sentences. Only the very experienced people can wing a presentation with minimal preparation and have it come out ok (they can usually do it because they know the subject inside out).

[higgins]

Here are some things I've tried. All give a net positive to me being less anxious.

- Rejection therapy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rejection_Therapy): get rejected by another person at least once per day. Great practice.

- Gardening. Shut off the computer and leave the phone at home. Plan to have several hours doing something you enjoy (for me that is gardening, hikes, beach, ocean) with no screens

- Exercise. Even if you don't do it at all, start like a child. Choose an activity you can imagine yourself realistically doing for the next few years. Bouldering, Biking, Power Lifting, Crossfit, Running, Yoga, Calisthenics.

- Treat your body and mind like a temple. As you consume something (food, digital) ask yourself: 'is this serving me?'. If it isn't or gives pause, explore alternatives. One of many reasons I don't drink anymore.

- Toastmasters (https://www.toastmasters.org/) or Improv club. I had a few years where I noticed my speaking skills plummeted. Toastmasters was recommended and I loved the playful club.

- Lunchclub (https://lunchclub.com/). Casual way to chat with other people in tech and other industries. Lots of people there are also working on social skills

[deafpolygon]

For exercise, walking is a totally valid exercise. You can split it up across the day and do it in between tasks/trips.

6x 10 min jog/powerwalking can be just as effective as 1h block of cardio.

[austin-cheney]

Fear regulation. You solve for this the same way you solve for anaphylaxis: regulated exposure. Learn to embrace the fear in small doses and through frequent practice you will eventually have none. The term military people use is embrace the suck. If you do this enough you will eventually lose almost all your irrational cognitive fears, which unlocks capabilities other people find strangely and unexpectedly confident.

Nicomachean Ethics provides further details. As for fear itself read Laches and Charmides knowing that recklessness is not the absence of fear, but the absence of risk analysis. When you are confident and fearless you can account for risk without delay of action or hesitation of decision.

The other half is speech. Once you become confident you must modify your ability to speak in a way that reflects such confidence. You must think ahead, on one hand, in order to know what to say. On the other hand you must remain slow and in control to fully regulate your spoken words such that each word is deliberately delivered with the desired timing and emphasis. This takes practice, but is less challenging than it sounds. If you can write with confidence, you can speak with confidence. If you cannot write then I would work on that first.

[reify]

After I qualified as a therapeutic counsellor I took up a two year post graduate top up to do my masters degree.

I had no academic background and no school qualifications. I had to take an access to Higher education qualification in Psychology to gain the basics of maths, english and psychology.

When I started my first classes I felt useless. All those educated and erudite people being able to eloquently speak on the subject matter. They all seemed to hand in perfect essays. Whereas, I usually spent days on end trying to perfect the perfect essay, rewrite after rewrite without success. My essay margins were full of tutors remarks.

I mentioned my frustration to one of my tutors.

She told me this: "You will never be an expert in our field. Everything that you want to write has already been written by some extremely clever and intelligent people who have spent there entire lives in academia."

"Stop trying to compete with them. I want to here and read what you have to say about Psychotherapy. I want to hear your unique views. It is not a competition, its about "being good enough" and that is all we can expect of ourselves as human beings. Perfectionism is a goal that can never be reached."

I wrote about those things which I had knowledge about and over the years, little by little, book by book, client by client, this developed into a vast ocean of understanding of my subject.

I learned to be me. I developed a sense of personal confidence. I even felt confident doing oral examinations and presentations.

Being good enough is all it takes. It is all we can really be.

I am a clasic introvert with an anxious avoidant personality traits. I used to spend my days staring at the floor.

[rcarr]

> Exposure therapy like Toastmasters seems to provide big short-term gains, but the effects fade fairly quickly, and if I don't do it for a few weeks I'm back where I started.

I've never participated in a Toastmasters so take with a pinch of salt, but I'd theorise this is happening because you're tackling a symptom and not the cause. Toastmasters is conditioning you to be able to perform a pre-prepared speech, which is ok, but that's not the real issue here. I'd wager the true issue is that you don't feel comfortable or have confidence in your ability to adapt to situations that are impossible to anticipate or prepare for.

I'd suggest taking improv comedy lessons as you'll naturally get used to becoming adaptive to whatever is thrown out there. You could also try playing DnD or some other table top role playing game because again, it's low stakes improvisation in a supportive environment and you can try on different characters and approaches and see what works for you.

[rapjr9]

I've worked a lot with grad students who have to give many presentations and have seen some of them completely freeze up and be unable to continue. One thing that helped a young Chinese scientist was personal tutoring in a safe setting with her supervisor to build confidence. Practicing with some of your coworkers beforehand helps. It's happened to me also and the way I dealt with it was to say to the audience "I lost my train of thought" and ask them to set me back on it. Nobody spoke up so I said "I guess it wasn't that important if nobody else remembers, I'll just continue with the next slide" which got one person to speak up who was actually listening. You could do this intentionally also to find out if your audience cares about what you are saying.

[spaintech]

I would recommend you seek profesional help from coaches who have experience in high stress high performance jobs. I received “a very long time ago” coaching for Special Ops and SWAT type jobs. This has been well documented in resulting useful for a broad range of personality traits [1] and I would recommend you consult with a well stablished profesional. Lots of high level CEO’s, celebrities, and high performer athletes use this type of coaching. This has become the go to strategy for F1 drivers as well.

Best of luck!

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328325503_Impact_of...

[cheese_van]

Never did. However, I discovered that unlike delivering a monologue about the subject, which unnerved me, answering questions didn't unsettle me. So rather than preparing a long speech, I just prepared a short "in a nutshell" speech, and then offered, "I'd like to hear what you think about the subject. Let's talk about what you want to talk about. Let's open the floor to questions." Interacting with questions proved more interesting, and somehow less threatening to me. And was more interesting for the audience. So my strategy was to launch into the question period as soon as possible. It worked great for me.

[stephencoyner]

I used to get very nervous for presentations or even speaking up in a meeting for the exact reason you gave. The honest truth is that forcing yourself to do as many presentations as possible is the best way to build confidence and ultimately kick the fear.

For me that came the hard way when transitioning from a strictly product role to a customer facing role where I had to be “on” every single day in customer calls. Eventually you realize that even your mistakes aren’t the end of the world and they’re truly nothing to be nervous about.

One small trick that helped me in the beginning of that change was typing everything I wanted to say multiple times without over practicing

[oops]

I’ve found that I’m far more relaxed when I’m really well-rehearsed.

[TexanFeller]

I tried to improve at presentations for a while. Now I basically just don't agree to do those or similar tasks. It might limit my career advancement a little, but really us software engineers make enough already, we don't need to torment ourselves by performing for people for more money. Forget "leadership" and advancement and do the parts of the job we enjoy and are actually good at.

PS 90% of all presentations are a waste of time, so the world doesn't even need this from you.

[clemailacct1]

I've ended up on TV (local TV news station), gave a talk at Blackhat and a couple other big public facing presentations for various security orgs. The only two things that sure-fire worked for me in this exact situation: getting older and repetition.

The older I got and the more I forced myself to get up there and do public speaking the easier it got.

That whole "imagine them naked" thing is a hilarious hoax for what its worth.

[jasfi]

You might want to try Ashwagandha. It's an adaptogen that works really well to reduce stress. You must try it beforehand though to find a dose that works for you. I personally can only take it once, when feeling stressed, never daily or my energy levels drop.

I've also heard you should ask your doctor first, in case you have an immune related disease with which Ashwagandha could interfere with.