Sunday, March 7, 2010

Coping With Anxiety

From Real Simple here are 10 suggestions on coping with Anxiety.























From their suggestions:

# 2  Make it worse. When you try too hard to control your anxieties, you only heighten them. Instead, exaggerate them and see what happens. For instance, if you fear that your mind will go blank during a presentation, fake it intentionally in the middle of your next one. Say, “Gee, what was I just saying?” Notice how this makes no difference. It’s nothing to worry about, right? I did this at a lecture once and no one raised an eyebrow. (Perhaps they weren’t listening anyway!)

Personally, at our conference this weekend, I was lucky and unfortunate enough to be presenting with a seasoned Ph.D. student who was both extremely comfortable with her material and confident in her ability to speak with conviction. My first reaction was to run out of the room because neither I nor my paper could stand up to that! Instead, I just thought OK this is my opportunity to make a giant leap foward academically and I concentrated on how well I knew my research and willed myself to look up from my paper and have a couple tiny conversations with the audience. Granted, it was only earth shattering for me but I took control of my nerves and made them work for me. Something I never thought would be possible for me!

2 comments:

  1. It also worked! You rocked!
    I have a similar story, but it involves teaching. I will never forget my very first day as a TA. I was going to lead 4 sections of students (18 in each section), and I was so nervous. I asked a friend, who was a seasoned TA, "what should I do if they ask me a question and I don't know the answer?" He said, "tell them that you don't know--then turn it into something they can either investigate, or explain that it's not something they need to know for the test"--and it works every time! I was so worried about looking dumb, but the reality is that no one else is in our heads but us!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks!

    That is a great suggestion for our readers since many graduate students are also taking that new leap into the classroom as instructors!

    ReplyDelete