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Public Speaking and CBD

Everyone's greatest fear - and a possible easy answer!

By david kranzPublished 4 years ago 4 min read
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PUBLIC SPEAKING. IT’S COMMONLY LISTED IN THE TOP 5 OF PEOPLE'S MOST HATED EXPERIENCES. HOWEVER THIS COMMON PHOBIA IS NOT ON PEOPLE’S HIT LIST TO IMPROVE ON.

The fear of speaking in public is not always about just the speaking portion. Many people who get up onto a stage to perform suffer from some kind of stage fright, or anxiety. From actors and musicians to make a pitch to a board room of suits, many people face this fear on a daily basis.

When we’re faced with a situation where we have to stand up in front of a group to provide animated discourse on a popular subject, some common physiological traits happen. We break into a sweat, our heart rate increases. Saliva production shuts down so your tongue feels like a cardboard slug. At the very primal level we are fighting our inbuild natural fight-or-flight instinct, as a bad performance not only means embarrassment and judgement, but also rejection and being ostracized from our social grouping.

To put it another way - we’re probably hard wired to feel nervous. And why not?

Thoughts

It’s at the back of our minds that everyone knows public speaking is dreadful. Hence we are therefore primed to believe this - and essentially we programme ourselves to be anxious without ever realizing it. Everyone thinks of themselves in a self-deprecating way when it comes to public speaking - e.g. they are terrible, they are boring when they are usually quite different down the pub or at a social occasion with friends.

Since we’re performance orientated people we tend to think about public speaking is all about communication of ideas and how we present information. The focus is then on presenting to the audience in a clear manner, which some people don’t believe that they can achieve.

Physiology

Anxiety and fear. The two of perhaps the most basic instincts that we have as human beings. They are built into our subconscious, and they are ready and primed to drive our nervous systems into overdrive when presented with a killer threat. It’s only natural that people don’t want to experience these elevated emotions, especially when the thought of public speaking has then kicked in the physiology of the nervous system - a double whammy!!

Skills

The most common approach to get over the fear of speaking is to work on you skills of public speaking. Conversely this lack of skill is one of the prime reasons why people think they don’t like public speaking!

Situations

The situations that life puts us into places high value on their engagement. Since presenting information to a large amount of people is not a common thing to do (when was the last time at a party that you started telling a joke to a room full of people only to falter half way through, because you weren’t sure of the punch line??) And essentially we put extra value onto these situations that then creates a feedback into more stress, because it’s more important to get right, which means more stress as we can’t get it wrong. Etc.etc.etc.

So - Where does CBD leave us in all of this??

In a recent double-blind study, 60 people between the ages of 18 and 35 were divided into groups and subjected (or should I say gifted) with CBD oil in varying doses, to see how effective it was to assist in alleviating these fears. Everyone had to give a speech to the other members of the team, after which they measured their anxiety levels according to the chart below and had their heart rates measured. [1]

Their conclusion?

Our results are consonant with evidence from preclinical studies and support the view that CBD induces acute anxiolytic effects with an inverted U-shaped dose-response curve in humans. These findings stress the importance of the careful choice of dose ranges when investigating the potential therapeutic effects of CBD. Further studies assessing the dose-response curve of CBD in other conditions such as schizophrenia, pain, epilepsy, and Parkinson’s disease and involving the chronic administration of CBD are necessary to translate preclinical evidence into clinical practice and to determine the precise therapeutic window of CBD for each condition.

It was shown to be remarkably effective in reducing symptoms of anxiety! 300mg was the apparent sweet spot for the dosage for any budding public speakers out there by the way.

This goes a long way to not only help people who can suffer from this condition, but also gives added weight to the body of research around CBD and its benefits for people who suffer from anxiety symptoms.

So - head over to www.qualis-est.com and grab some oil - and remember to mention us in your nest killer speech!

[1] "Inverted U-Shaped Dose-Response Curve of the Anxiolytic ...." 11 May. 2017, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28553229. Accessed 18 Nov. 2019.

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