Your boss tells you that you need to do a presentation next week. Immediately, your hands begin to sweat, your stomach develops butterflies, your heart rate increases, your breath shortens, and your mind momentarily blanks out.
After a few moments, you regain a bit of control and start to envision yourself actually doing the presentation in front of a group of people. You see yourself tripping over words, picture your audience seeing your hands shake, get a glimpse of yourself being criticized by the crowd, or feel the sense of having your mind go blank, forgetting everything that you know.
All of this after simply being told you had to present!
This is a common scenario, as many people are terrified of public speaking. Although there are many psychoneuroimmunological factors at play, in addition to developmental issues, coping mechanisms, operant conditioning, and even genetics, let us look at one central driving force.
Society, culture, knowledge, and technology have all dramatically changed over the years, decades, and centuries; however, from a stress reactivity standpoint the human brain has not evolved equally. In fact, when we encounter stressors, our brain still reacts as if we were on the grasslands of Africa, where we had to fight for our lives from predators and competing clans. These potentially deadly situations humans encountered are known as emergent stressors — what our stress system is designed to protect us from: harm or death (Comer, 2020).
But even today, with no lurking tigers, our........