A f(l)ight with your stage fright

"His palms are sweaty, knees week, arms are heavy, there's vomit on his sweater already…"

I'll stop here. You are either, if not both, familiar with these verses of Eminem or have gone through a similar predicament surrounded by trepidation. (Hopefully, with a clean sweater) 

That agonizing throat-drying moment, right before a presentation or simply while emceeing a glitzy ceremony, weighs down on your knees as your whole body revolts against you. However, you still conjure some pathetic replica of willpower and tread up the stage. With wobbly legs, you turn to the friendly audience, and their soul-piercing eyes are enough to jumpstart your 'fight or flight' response. Now, this was all hunky-dory when this very mechanism would have saved your ancestors some centuries back from being devoured by a man eating T-rex, per say, but it's not very opportune on the present humid day, when this same ancient intuitive compulsion kicks in on the face of a room full of harmless potato-crazy humans. "Hello? Brain? Learn to distinguish already!" 

 So, yes, you are awkwardly positioned on the stage under an imaginative stark limelight when your inner voices start acting like your condescendingly cynical chacha and start whispering confidence-shattering questions: So, what if you stammer? Or, or you might just forget your lines! Oh! I know! What if your crush thinks you are dimwitted? And then the worst happens. These actually happen. 

Puke. 

Some scientific studies have concluded that picturing your audience in their underwear helps. But let's face it, that would probably make you race for the fire exit instead. So let them be well clad. An evolved version of this approach suggests it is more agreeable to replace those God-awful faces with the face of someone you love. (*cough* Scarlett Johansson *cough*) Or in my case, imagining giant pizza slices, occupying those seats instead. 

An expert advice that tricks your brain into releasing less fear-inducing hormones into your neurons is to tell yourself that you are better than the rest, repeatedly. While this will not be the case in actuality, feed your ego with pretentious notions of how the audience is at awe with you. This will shift the dynamics and give you the upper hand in the room. If you are too frank to give a damn about this theory, then start doing it the old school way: Prepare. 

Practice your speech, day in day out, in the presence of your soul-sucking friends to your doting mother who would even find your mumbling charming. You can even practice your speech with bus conductor mamas and yourself in the mirror, even though it would probably tell how you are not the brightest of all. A well-prepared speaker is less likely to forget lines and uh, um, you know, like use filler words which disintegrate and scrape away at the content of your speech.

Take a pause instead, and in case you had forgotten it, breathe. Not with your nose, but with your diaphragm. A few respiratory exercises act as calming tonics for the anxious. You can take this up a notch and do some real time exercises which release the exact counter-hormones to make you feel like a Rap God (x2). Nothing like powerful cardio to make your confidence flex its muscles, eh? 

Lastly, when all else fails, and you are turned into a wobbly jelly on jitters, take ownership of your miserable situation and crack a few jokes about your sweat-trickling condition.  Make the audience laugh with you before they start laughing at you. This creates an invigorating energy across the room where you no longer have to be uncomfortable and the crowd no longer has to be naked.

Iqra suffers from wanderlust, dreams of discovering the Loch Ness Monster and occasionally complains about Economics. Tell her to get a life at iqralaqa@gmail.com or https://www.facebook.com/iqra.l.qamari