At Ethos3, we believe that honing your presentation skills is critical. Your ability to speak in front of an audience can affect both your personal and professional development. But that’s not just because public speaking is tied to communication, persuasion, or social interaction. Public speaking has a few brain benefits you might not have considered.
Let’s look at 2 unexpected effects public speaking might have on your brain. We’ll explore a couple scientific studies along the way since we like to back everything we teach with scientific proof.
1. Anti-Aging
Denise C. Park, Director of Research of the Center for Vital Longevity at the University of Texas at Dallas, has spent her life studying how the human brain ages. She says we give lots of time and attention to understanding how the body ages. However, we have less information about how to help slow the aging process of our brains. Park asks, “what if challenging mental activity slows the rate at which the brain ages?” In her research, she wanted to find out if engaging in challenging new tasks that were socially-oriented had any effect on the brain. After just three months of intervention, Park and her fellow researchers discovered “that the adults who were productively engaged in learning new skills showed improvements in memory.”
In order to see improvements in memory, the activity the adults participated in had to meet the following criteria. They “required active engagement and tapped working memory, long-term memory and other high-level cognitive processes.” Those all come into play during the process of developing, designing, and delivering a presentation. And each presentation forces you to learn new skills and adapt to new speaking environments and audiences. That means you can use public speaking as a way to improve your memory as you age.
2. Overcoming Anxiety
When you find yourself in a nerve-wracking situation like public speaking, your body’s fight, flight, or freeze response is activated. Your brain is actually designed to keep you safe. It’s meant to help you react quickly to potentially dangerous situations. If that stress response happens enough around a certain event, usually one of two things happens. Either you learn that particular event is not actually threatening and your fear response lessens. Or, your fear response escalates and you start to fear that event or events like it even more. It becomes a learned pattern of fear. Then, nervousness can turn into anxiety which can turn into panic and trauma.
However, you can learn to control your stress response when you are exposed to small doses of it. Research from Harvard acknowledges that “people can learn techniques to counter the stress response.” Giving a presentation even though you are nervous is along the lines of exposure therapy. Whenever we are afraid of something, we tend to avoid it. By not “facing our fears,” those fears can actually grow to unrealistic proportions. The American Psychological Association says, “Although this avoidance might help reduce feelings of fear in the short term, over the long term it can make the fear become even worse . . . exposure therapy . . . [can] help break the pattern of avoidance and fear.”
Public Speaking=A Better Brain
When you work to hone your public speaking skills despite feeling unqualified or nervous, you are actually boosting your brain. You are improving your memory through cognitive training. And the benefits of similar programs have been proven to last at least 10 years. In addition, public speaking increases your practice in controlling your own stress response. And the benefits of reducing your anxiety are many. For example, you can appear more confident in tough social situations. Or you can go into your next job interview more relaxed.
So find ways to invest in your public speaking skills, your brain will thank you. (Your brain says this might be a great place to get started.)
