How Anxiety Can Impact Your Communication: A Guide to Coping and Improving
If you’ve ever felt anxious in a social situation, then you know how nerve-wracking it can be. Anxiety can hinder your ability to communicate and connect with other people, making you feel even more anxious. In some situations, a little bit of nervousness can be beneficial. But when anxiety becomes overwhelming and persistent, it affects your life.
If you often feel anxious in social situations, consider these tips for coping and improving your communication skills.
Ways Anxiety Impairs Communication
When you experience anxiety, there are a variety of potential issues that could make communication challenging. Several instances include:
- Distracted Thinking
You may be anxiously thinking about numerous things, overly focused on how you feel, or stuck on a particular thought.
- Overthinking From Nervousness
It’s common to overthink each conversation when you’re apprehensive and speaking to someone else. To ensure that you say the proper thing, consider every word you’re about to say. But it disturbs the natural flow of communication if you constantly second-guess what you are about to say.
- Tongue Stumbling
Typically, your tongue makes the exact movements required to produce the desired sounds and letters. However, because your brain concentrates on that motion while you’re anxious, it’s common for some automatic body actions to become less automatic. This could make it more difficult for your tongue to move naturally, which could cause you to stumble when speaking.
- Lightheadedness/Trouble Thinking/Loss of Reality
Your brain may get overloaded by anxiety. It can result in a loss of reality, which makes it difficult to hear or think clearly. Additionally, it may make you feel dizzy and impair your thinking. In these situations, the flawed thinking frequently doesn’t get better until the panic attack has passed and your breathing has returned to normal.
- Trouble Listening
Being overly preoccupied with a person’s nonverbal cues or facial expressions can interfere with your ability to listen and focus on what they are saying. Anxiety about the message’s substance may force you to concentrate too much on a single word or phrase. It may prevent you from hearing other important information that you need to hear to respond appropriately.
Quick treatment for communication problems
Because diverse concerns are involved, you can also employ several techniques to improve your communication and prevent your communication problems from making you feel more anxious. Consider the following:
- Inform the other individual. Be honest with the person you’re speaking to when something interferes with your concentration. Instead of attempting to pretend that everything is OK and stumbling through the conversation, it could be preferable to admit to the other person.
- Insist on hearing once more. Take a minute and ask them to repeat themselves if you find it difficult to concentrate on the talk. Simply asking them to repeat it provides you another chance to listen, rather than making you more worried because you missed what they said.
- Avoid overthinking. Of course, it’s easier to advise someone not to overthink than to do it. Try to speak how you would like to, and if you say anything awkward, that’s okay.
- Exercise Conversation. The more frequently you converse with folks, the simpler it can become for you. Try honing your conversational skills with someone you trust. Attempting to carry on a conversation by yourself can also be practiced.
You must deal with such problems first if you are having a panic attack or losing your sense of reality. Controlled, calm breathing can help minimize hyperventilation, and some people find that submerging their hands in cool water will help them regain focus. Calm music, meditation, or a CBT audio session in the Sensera app are additional tools in the fight against anxiety.
