How to Manage Cortisol and Stress Before You Speak

Ever wondered what's actually happening in your body when you feel that pre-speech dread? A central role in it is played by cortisol — the hormone behind your stress response, the shaky voice and the suddenly blank mind. Understand it, and you can start to bring it down.

What cortisol actually is

Cortisol, often called the "stress hormone," is a steroid hormone produced by the adrenal glands. It's released in response to stress signals from the brain, priming you to flee or fight. It switches on whenever some part of you reads the situation as a threat — even when that "threat" is just a room full of people waiting for you to start talking.

Why too much of it is a problem

A short burst of cortisol is genuinely useful. The trouble starts when stress stays switched on for a long time. Prolonged high cortisol is linked to:

1. Raised blood pressure. Cortisol pushes the body to produce more glucose, which in turn drives blood pressure up.
2. Weight gain. Stressful states nudge us toward more calorie-dense food.
3. Disturbed sleep. Insomnia and chronic sleep problems are very common when cortisol runs high.

Why speaking in public triggers it so hard

1. The stage works like a magnifying glass. Facing an audience head-on concentrates all their attention onto a single point — you. Feeling that energy aimed at them, a speaker can feel completely exposed. It's why roughly four in ten people, offered the chance to present, answer with some version of: "Sure, put me on the schedule — but I already know I'll come down with something that day." On stage, everything shows: every crease in your shirt, every slip of the tongue, every movement.
2. On stage, every emotion is amplified — and time seems to speed up. My own biggest public failure happened during a live TV culture programme. In a discussion with a critic I lost the thread entirely — a total blackout. Instead of reaching for what I wanted to say, I just counted the seconds of silence, my only thought being "when does this end?" Driving home, I braced myself and watched the recording to find out how bad it really was. That "black hole" pause that had felt like several agonising seconds? Half a second on tape. It simply looked like a brief moment of thought.
3. The stage is a transformation zone. People who step onto it change. They become more charismatic, more open, more communicative. There's only one rule to make that happen reliably — regularity.

The perfectionist

A young salesman once came to me and announced: "This is going to be my year of public speaking." We built a careful schedule around his goals, with one condition — after three months he would speak in front of at least 100 people for at least an hour. We met twice a week, with one of those sessions spent presenting to a small group and doing live broadcasts.

Watching his first, anxiety-soaked session, I realised he was a perfectionist. He'd watched every podcast and video about public speaking, sat through lectures, read the books. And yet in that first session he couldn't even get out a "Hello" — he was frozen by blocking anxiety. Every gesture, every word felt to him not excellent, not good enough for his impossibly high ideal. He was at war with himself, and it was not a flattering image.

Under stress, people move in strangely revealing ways: some sway at the hips, some twist their feet into an awkward X, some avoid the audience and talk to something out the window, some freeze on one spot, some retreat to the back of the stage and watch the audience over their shoulder, some don't know what to do with their hands and let them dangle as if they belonged to someone else, and some hug themselves and won't let go. This young man sweated and wrung his hands. What he needed was an inner shift — "I don't care anymore, I'm burning the bridges, I'm just doing it." He had to exhaust himself completely before he could finally let go of those perfectionist standards. The result of all that training: he delivered three talks to audiences of 100 — the first such talks of his life.

Another cortisol victim

More recently I worked with a woman gripped by the same blocking anxiety. Even mid-lesson, asked simply to speak a two-minute fragment, she'd start running out of air, her voice would shrink, she stopped looking at the screen, and she seemed to be vanishing in front of me. It felt like watching a no-rules fight in which a person was tearing into themselves. Then she said, "I can't do this anymore" — and her eyes filled with tears. That's the signal to stop the lesson.

In about half of all cases, the real cause of speaking anxiety is the inability to move from written language to spoken language. It struck me as telling that she'd already mentioned three times that she was afraid of forgetting her text. So I started asking about those blackouts — and something important surfaced.

At school she'd been an excellent student. With one exception: she could never recite poems from memory. She'd learn them, then lose one trivial word and watch every other word collapse with it. Her self-image as a top student began to crack, and year by year she built up an internal monster called "Fear of Forgetting the Text." This is especially common in introverts, who all too readily feed themselves the belief that they simply can't speak. That monster suffocated her in every work presentation — it would start tormenting her a week in advance, and by the time she had to present it had already destroyed her.

Once we'd found the source, the path was clear. She had to learn not to memorise text but to improvise in a controlled way; then to master a few content tools that make remembering far easier; and finally to prepare her body and mind with very simple breathing and calming techniques before speaking.

Hiding

Speaking stress drives a lot of people to hide their personality from the audience, and they get creative about it. They:

1. Build blindingly busy slides and talk only to the slides, as if the audience weren't there.
2. Hide by reading all — or at least 80% — of the presentation aloud.
3. Hide literally, wedging themselves into a dark corner of the stage.
4. Hide by showing no natural reaction at all — essentially speaking like a robot.

Every one of these should be avoided. People who do this want to become impersonal, deliberately stripping the most vulnerable part of themselves — their identity — off the stage. What's left is a shell that recites text. But audiences don't want text. They want to follow a story with highs and lows, emotion and intrigue, with a main character they can identify with.

In conclusion

This is what people look like when they're trying to adapt to an environment they're not used to. We fear the unknown. That many-headed creature we call "the audience" threatens something deep in us: we want to belong to a community, not to be cut off, because being cut off has always made survival harder. Elevated cortisol is simply the body sounding that ancient alarm.

The good news is that anxiety can be overcome — hundreds of people have already done it, and the body responds to training just like any other skill. For more on calming those nerves at the root, read how to overcome stage fright, then choose a programme and start practising under guidance.