My vision is fuzzy, my heart is racing and my lungs are emptying of oxygen. I’ve just been asked to speak in a meeting at my first graduate job on a fashion magazine. My task is simple – read out the week’s social media stats – but I can’t make it through. I cut the presentation short. I sit down, murmuring an apology, my eyes stinging with tears.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. I had my first panic attack during a university class presentation. As the room started to spin and my breath grew short, I ditched most of what I’d prepared just to reach the end of my speech as fast as possible. When I returned to my seat, the lecturer carried on as though nothing had happened, but I was mortified. It had blindsided me. I’d enjoyed public speaking at school. Since when had I become such an anxious wreck?

Over the past decade, I’ve done everything I can to avoid public speaking – and it’s come at a cost. I’ve turned down the chance to give speeches at friends’ birthdays, declined to speak on the radio about articles I’ve poured myself into, and said no to panels discussing topics I care deeply about. I just can’t risk another public meltdown.

I’m not the only one who feels this way. According to a 2023 YouGov survey, half of Britons experience a phobia (known as glossophobia), fear or anxiety of public speaking, second only to a fear or phobia of heights – and above spiders and snakes. This fear seems prevalent among younger people, with another survey finding that 63% of gen Z said they would avoid public speaking if they didn’t have to.

After a string of panic attacks during job interviews, I decided it was time to do something to cure my dread of public speaking using some of the most effective methods out there.

A specific form of psychotherapy

I tell Dr Robert (who prefers to remain anonymous), a member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, my history of performance anxiety. Robert is an EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) Europe accredited consultant, and he tells me that this form of psychotherapy could help by changing how my brain stores past negative experiences.

“When stressful things happen, sometimes it gets stored in the nervous system,” Robert says. “Part of you feels the trauma is still happening. EMDR is a way of unsticking it, speeding up a process that would hopefully happen anyway.”

By guiding me through lateral eye movements while I recall a negative public speaking memory – or another past experience fuelling my anxiety – Robert says I’m “taxing” my working memory: “Each time you retrieve a memory, reflect on it, then store it, you’re rewriting it with less emotional intensity.”

“You might start with a negative belief: I’m hopeless,” he says. “And once you process it, you’re able to think about it as an adult from a new perspective.” The more sessions I do, the less I see my public speaking anxiety as something that’s wrong with me, and more a product of bad memories.

Early on, we try the “flash” technique. It involves recalling distressing public speaking experiences and rating the level of disturbance from one to 10. Then I shift my focus to something enjoyable – watching Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter music videos. We repeat this cycle until the distress fades or I reach a “0”. It feels strange at first, but the memories gradually become less upsetting.

When I ask Robert whether it’s possible to cure glossophobia through EMDR, he emphasises that exposure therapy is important too. “If somebody has a phobia of, say, going in the lift, we can do the EMDR – but if they never get in the lift, the anxiety is just going to go up again,” he says. “There’s a principle that the further away you stay from something, the more likely you are to be anxious of it.”

Bootcamp for public speaking

Taking Robert’s advice, a week after starting EMDR, I head to my first Toastmasters – a club for improving public speaking skills held in a side room at a pub.

The host stands and delivers a confident speech about his own story of public speaking. He asks the audience to repeat the mantra “experiment, fail, learn, and repeat” several times. It feels a bit like I’ve joined a cult, but the chanting is reassuring. If there’s anywhere it’s OK to have a panic attack in front of a crowd, this is it.

Founded in 1905 by Dr Ralph Smedley, Toastmasters was started to train boys and men in speech-giving but soon became popular among business types looking to excel at work. Nowadays it draws in a diverse crowd, welcoming people of all ages and backgrounds. I meet an NHS doctor who wants to get better at explaining to his clients what depression is, and chat to a first-time author who wants to prepare for press interviews.

Toastmasters is free for guests, but paid-up members host the event and get to practise longer speeches. Guests can volunteer for a speaking challenge, which may involve being given a random topic and speaking on it for two minutes.

I’m the first guest called to speak, and am given the topic, “How do you get someone to tell you a secret?” When I start, I feel as if I’m in a daydream. I pull together hurried thoughts about how I’d share a secret of my own, but trip over my words and struggle to fill the time (I spoke for 48 seconds). No panic attack – but it was definitely no TEDx Talk.

Virtual reality training

I head to Cambridge to meet behaviour scientist Dr Chris Macdonald, who has developed a VR platform to help people overcome public speaking nerves. He used to struggle with public speaking – and seeing a teenage relative develop a fear of presenting in front of classmates motivated him to find a solution.

Macdonald read every research paper he could find on public speaking anxiety and considered possible tools. Nothing was too trivial: “If imagining the audience in their underwear was helpful, I would have considered it,” he says. He found that exposure therapy stands out as the most well-evidenced technique, along with other tools such as breathing exercises that slow your heart rate and certain eye movements that calm the brain’s fear centre.

He developed a hybrid platform featuring various photorealistic audiences. It can be accessed via laptop, VR headset or smartphone. “I want this to be freely and easily accessible,” Macdonald says.

But how could VR capture the real terror of standing in front of a crowd? Macdonald’s research is highly promising. A study found that students who used the headset for a 30-minute session of overexposure therapy reported experiencing reduced public speaking anxiety. And in trial results to be published later this year, it was found that one week of training with VR overexposure was beneficial to 100% of participating students.

Armed with a seven-day treatment plan, provided by Macdonald ahead of my next Toastmasters session, I leave Cambridge feeling buoyed. I have to practise in VR daily, increasing the audience size each time. By building up to an audience of thousands in VR and delivering a four-minute speech I’ll be intentionally “overexposing” myself.

“It starts to feel like a step-down,” says Macdonald. “And that’s what people are reporting: that the practice in VR was harder than their actual presentation.”

At home, I’m surprised by how realistic the experience feels. It’s much more engaging to practise in VR. Rehearsing in front of friends or family can feel awkward, and doing it alone is dull. Whereas VR presenting feels more immersive and rewarding. With each practice run, my confidence grows. I’m even starting to enjoy speaking on random topics I’m given.

Ten days after meeting Macdonald, I’m at Toastmasters again, more nervous than the first time. The room is packed. My anxiety builds as I wait, raising my hand every time the host asks for a guest to take on a random topic. I try to shove fears of a panic attack aside as I watch other peoples’ speeches, and focus on doing a relaxation technique that Macdonald showed me: breathing in for four seconds, holding for seven and exhaling for eight.

When I’m chosen, I make my way to the front, where I’m given the topic: “Why is it good to go out of your comfort zone?”

“As someone terrified of public speaking, I’m totally out of my comfort zone,” I start by saying. Being honest immediately makes me less nervous. I feel fairly calm. I talk about why I think exposure therapy is so important, then talk about my music tastes, which I’m trying to expand out of my comfort zone – or at least beyond my TikTok algorithm. I speak for a full two minutes without any real difficulty.

“It’s a miracle,” I text my partner after I step off stage. One member, who saw my first speech, squeezes my arm and whispers: “You overcame the nerves.”

It wasn’t a perfect speech: I wrung my hands throughout and could have structured my response better. But the distance I’ve come in a month feels miraculous. For the first time in more than a decade, public speaking doesn’t feel impossible. And I haven’t had to imagine anyone in their underwear to get here.

5 tips for overcoming fear of public speaking

by Dr Chris Macdonald

1. Keep it simple
Before you even think about a calm delivery, simplify your message. Strip away unnecessary jargon, complex sentence structures, and tangential anecdotes. Focus on the core idea you want to convey. A concise script will be easier to remember and far more engaging for your audience.

2. Get the air out of your lungs
Breathing that involves prolonged exhalations trigger an automatic response that slows your heart rate and calms you down. Try breathing in through the nose for a count of 4, holding one’s breath for a count of 7, and exhaling from the mouth for a count of 8. You could do this in the moments before your presentation. When presenting, be sure to slow things down and allow for pauses.

3. Get the words out of your mouth
Speaking too quietly not only makes it harder for the audience to understand you, but it also speeds up your heart rate and can make you feel more anxious. Speakers report their volume levels as being much higher than the audience members report. Therefore, try to speak much more loudly than you think you need to.

4. Get your focus out into the room
Self-focus and the associated self-criticism are a common route to increased anxiety. Instead, guide your focus outwards. Focus on the message. When speaking to larger audiences, often looking at faces can raise levels of anxiety, and so you can look slightly above their heads and towards the back of the room, thus increasing your field of view, which can further help to calm the brain. You can add to this calming effect by introducing lateral eye movements, looking side to side, as this quietens brain activity in the amygdala and therefore suppresses our fear response, resulting in a profound calming effect.

5. Get out of your comfort zone
Most people practise a presentation at home on their own in a comfortable environment to an audience of zero. Accordingly, even a small audience can feel like a significant step up. However, with the latest advancements in VR, it is possible to practise in front of a wide range of increasingly challenging photorealistic audiences. This overexposure therapy will accelerate desensitisation and build extra resilience, adaptability, and confidence.