Can Fear of Public Speaking be “rewritten”?
When I talk about speech anxiety, I always talk about rerecording the “negative” tape recorder in our head. That tape recorder tells us that “I won’t be interesting”, “I’ll make a mistake”, etc. I believe that people have anxiety because they keep listening to that tape recorder.
I tell people that the recorder needs to change and you can experience a reduction of anxiety.
Researchers at NYU have a study talking about this very concept. Quote from an article in The Guardian:
In a breakthrough that has major implications for treating phobias and anxiety disorders, psychologists have helped people conquer their fears by “rewriting” their memories to make them less traumatic.
The therapy takes advantage of the discovery that human memories can be modified and made less frightening if they are manipulated soon after they are retrieved.
Scientists at New York University found peoples’ memories were susceptible to being rewritten between three minutes and six hours of a memory being recalled. Only memories that were rewritten in this time frame remained changed a year after the treatment.
Of course, they did this with electric shocks and viewing red or blue squares.
But if you can recall the memory and “rewrite” it while experiencing the anxiety, it could curb apprehension. I would love to see a study using the same methodology involving speech anxiety.
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