
Distortions of thinking and fear of audiences - an introduction to CBT
stage fright, and in fact every emotion in general, arises as a response to reality, and more precisely to how we experience reality. Most of the time our interpretation of reality is true (for example when I interpret a smile as a sign of closeness, or a curse as a sign of hostility) and helps us use our emotions, but sometimes it happens that our interpretation of reality is wrong and creates incorrect emotions (for example when the smile is cynical, or when the curse is actually a sign of male humor shared).
When it happens once, a wrong interpretation of reality can cause incorrect feelings and possibly also short-circuits in communication. But when misinterpretation becomes persistent it can cause permanent emotional disturbance. For example if I always evaluate my performance as poor I will develop low self-esteem, and if I always evaluate myself as too fat I may develop eating disorders.
Hence, it is important to understand why identifying wrong thought patterns is critical to the diagnosis of emotional disorders, and is the first step in any cognitive behavioral emotional therapy. It is of course much more complicated than it sounds (and there is a whole branch of psychology, called Cognitive behavioral psychology who researches the field) but there are several ways to do this.
Thinking distortions - the mental cause of an emotional problem
Thought distortions didn't start out as a bad thing. They are actually an important working tool of our brain that is out of balance and instead of bringing benefit begins to harm us.
When our brain comes to interpret reality - social life, dangers, opportunities, etc. - it uses lots and lots of shortcuts that usually help us but sometimes are harmful. These shortcuts (discovered by Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist) greatly optimize our lives when they work correctly - for example, if I know how to recognize a person's social and economic status based on their clothing, it will be easier for me to decide how to behave towards them. These shortcuts are acquired over a long time based on life experience and influences from society, so when we learned something wrong it will be very difficult to change it. And that would be a distortion of thinking. For example if I got used from my environment that all blacks are stupid I will not only become a racist and hurt others, but I may also miss social and business opportunities and harm myself. And such a distortion is very difficult to correct because it is based on years of experiences and hints that many of them are not even aware of.
Distortions of thinking and fear of the crowd
Fear of crowds is a type of phobia, meaning an irrational fear of something that shouldn't be scary. Even those who suffer from an acute phobia will agree that actually, when you think about it, there is really nothing to fear from an audience. This, by the way, is what makes crowd anxiety so frustrating - the knowledge that there is really nothing to be afraid of and the inability to stop being afraid - but it is a necessary step in overcoming.
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Distortions before speech
- Dictatorship of standards - 'I have to bombard every presentation'
- Thinking in black and white - 'If I have even a small tremor in my voice then I have failed'
- Catastrophizing – 'A bad presentation will be the end of me'
Distortions while speaking
- Mind reading - 'He yawned, a sign that everyone was bored'
- Diminishing comparisons - 'My boss always manages to shine even without preparation'
Distortions after speaking
- Continuous judgment - 'I didn't sleep all night because of a small blackout'
To treat audience anxiety with the help of treatment of thinking distortions
The treatment of thinking distortions is done with the cognitive behavioral therapy technique (and sometimes also with the NLP method) for crowd anxiety with behavioral-cognitive methods is not the most powerful treatment available, so we usually offer it in addition to our courses and not instead of them, but it has some very important advantages.
Although it is not a particularly strong treatment, it works in the long term. This is why we recommend doing it at the beginning of our course or even before it. Another advantage it has is the wide range of problems it treats - for example, anxiety about those in authority, or generalized social anxiety.