7 Key Signs You Might Have Glossophobia (Fear of Public Speaking)
Mindspa Phobia Clinic • May 9, 2025
Recognizing Public Speaking Fear and Anxiety
Glossophobia, or the fear of public speaking, is more common than most people think. While some nerves before a presentation are normal, for those with glossophobia, the anxiety can be intense and debilitating. It can affect career opportunities, education, and personal confidence.
If you suspect you may glossophobia, here are seven key signs and symptoms to look out for:
1. Build-up of anxiety before speaking – You feel dread or panic hours or even days before a speaking engagement.
2. Avoidance – You go out of your way to skip events that involve speaking in front of others. Y
3. Managing or manipulating situations – You try to control who’s in the room, when you speak, or what topics are discussed to reduce anxiety.
4. Freezing or blanking – Your mind goes blank or you lose your train of thought while speaking.
5. Severe physical symptoms – These can include rapid heartbeat, over-breathing, shaking, sweating, or feeling faint.
6. Irrational negative thoughts – You fear being judged, humiliated, or making mistakes, even without any real threat.
7. Obsessive rumination afterward – After speaking, you replay what happened and criticize yourself excessively.
Recognizing these symptoms is the first step toward addressing them. Whether you're experiencing mild nerves or extreme public speaking anxiety, know that help is available and effective treatment is possible.
Guy Baglow, clinical lead at the Mindspa Phobia Clinic, was interviewed in an article about the treatment of unusual phobias.
Understand glossophobia (public speaking fear) and treatments to overcome it with this useful glossary, including CBT, stage fright and exposure therapy.
Avoidance by people with glossophobia reinforces fear. Avoiding public speaking may give temporary relief but limits career growth and strengthens anxiety.
Glossophobia is a specific fear of public speaking, but is it a form or social anxiety or should it be treated as a distinct issue?
Lucy shares how the "Fast Phobia Cure” helped her conquer her glossophobia and overcome her fear of public speaking at the Mindspa Phobia Clinic.
Chris Evans, The Guardian, 12 June 2017
The Fast Phobia Cure (also known as the Rewind Technique or, in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), as “The Visual-Kinaesthetic Dissociation Technique”) is an advanced tool to decondition phobias and trauma (such as PTSD). Its efficacy has been assessed in many academic papers such as the work by Gray & Liotta. It’s safe, gentle and without the drugs, scare tactics, psychological archaeology and exposure used by the older and less effective phobia treatments. The Fast Phobia Cure* is now widely accepted as the most reliable and effective treatment for all kinds of phobias, even long-standing and severe ones. It’s probably the single most reliable and effective tool in psychotherapy today and is being used more and more as a front-line treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder including trauma caused by accidents, assaults, war and witnessing critical incidents. If you have ever seen someone being almost instantly released from their phobia on TV and thought “Wow, how did they do that?” you can bet the therapist used The Fast Phobia Cure. So how does it work? A phobia is driven by a pattern-matching process whereby the unconscious mind creates “fear templates” around “dangerous” things or situations to try and keep you safe from the imagined threat in future. It then broadly matches these patterns to more and more situations as a phobia develops. What Fast Phobia Cure does, in a very creative way, is interfere with those patterns – it subtly changes the templates by changing the way we experience the memories – so when the unconscious mind tries to match the patterns, they don’t match anymore and the anxiety is no longer triggered. The templates (memories) will still be there, they will just feel different. The emotional tag will be gone. The phobia just won’t work anymore. This can all be done very quickly because the brain learns very fast. It learned to be phobic very fast. Teaching it how not to be phobic can be, and is necessarily, equally fast. It does not take long-term treatment. The mind can then start to generalise outwards, but this time in a very positive way, as it begins to associate more and more situations with feelings of calm and control. One of the great things about The Fast Phobia Cure is that it is non-intrusive: the therapist doesn’t need to know the precise details of the traumatic memories or phobic encounters because the sufferer brings their content (their experiences) to the process. The methodology of the Fast Phobia Cure was first developed by Richard Bandler, one of the founders of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) – the new science of excellence and personal change. It is so effective at detraumatising memories that it is being used more and more as a front-line treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder including trauma caused by accidents, assaults, war and witnessing critical incidents.
Phobias are not the same as normal fear responses. It is normal, for example, to experience some fear when on a precipice or in the presence of a snake. But not to be terrified at the thought of a high place or snake. It is the overwhelming terror that distinguishes a phobia. If you have a phobia you will be able to induce some of the common fear responses – shortness of breath, sweating, dizziness, nausea, increased heart-rate, flushing, shaking – just by thinking about the trigger. You are likely to have only one phobia. You may have other fears, but probably only one phobia. People generally seem to have the capacity for one proper phobia.
Our clients bring with them some very interesting examples of phobias. These phobias fall into two types: Specific or Simple phobias These are phobias linked to a specific object or situation. Examples are spiders, snakes, bees, worms, frogs, birds, dogs, cats, hedgehogs, goldfish, sharks, vomiting, driving , flying clowns, balloons, thunder, needles, blood, dentists, beards, buttons, velvet, feathers, lifts and marbles. Specific phobias can also be generalised – for example to all slimy green reptiles rather than just frogs. This seems to happen when the original traumatic event can’t be recalled. Non-specific phobias These phobias produce a more general anxiety or terror linked to social or performance situations and are often accompanied by panic attacks. Agoraphobia (open spaces), claustrophobia (confined spaces) and social phobia (public speaking, being the centre of attention) are non-specific phobias.
Most people know the technical, scientific name for their phobia. This may give them some comfort: it has a name so they know they are not the first person in the world to have the phobia. But whatever the phobia, someone else has it whether or not it has been given a Greek/Latin name. And knowing its name probably hasn’t helped them deal with it. In fact, just the opposite: we know that some phobics experience anxiety at the mention of the scientific name. A person with a phobia of long words won’t be helped by knowing they have hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia. So we rarely use these names in our clinics and we haven’t listed them here.