Why showing stress and anxiety can improve your image

As with many people, public speaking used to fill me with dread. I’m a writer and I feel much more comfortable expressing myself in writing rather than on stage.

But, interestingly, I found that the feeling of anxiety itself is perfectly tolerable. What worried me was the ways in which people would receive my nervous energy – that slight wavering of the voice, the unconscious biting of the lips…

I thought I would be severely judged for any nonverbal signals that revealed my lack of confidence. I was anxious about my anxiety—a double whammy of worry that made the event seem that much scarier.

You may have already felt the same way before a job interview or an important work meeting with your bosses. And the more you try to suppress your feelings, the more strength they gain.

But a surprising new study has concluded that these concerns may be unfounded. Jamie Whitehouse, a researcher at the Trent University of Nottingham, UK, has shown that visible signs of stress are often positive and leave people predisposed to like us and treat us kindly.

If that’s true, we don’t need to worry so much about keeping a calm, impassive expression as if we were playing poker – with the assurance that people will welcome our emotional authenticity.

magnanimous monkeys

Whitehouse’s interest in stress is based on the theory of evolution.

Stress is typically accompanied by a number of internal physiological changes that help us prepare the body to face a challenge. A racing heart, for example, helps deliver oxygen to the body and brain, which allows us to react more quickly.

It is easy to see why these changes are the result of adaptations. Many primates, when stressed, also exhibit characteristic “displacement” behaviors – such as nervously scratching their skin, for example. This kind of behavior doesn’t seem to serve any obvious purpose in dealing with the situation that causes the discomfort. So why did evolution lead them to do this?

One possibility is that this behavior helps to smooth out social interactions with the group.

Primate groups are often complex, with alliances among their members and established hierarchies. Encountering a potentially hostile individual can be a major cause of stress.

Displacement behaviors can act as subtle signals that demonstrate this discomfort, reducing the risk of unnecessary confrontation. After all, for individuals with higher rank, the most arrogant rivals may be the ones most in need of a lesson in humility—and not necessarily the ones who are already agitated.

In 2017, Whitehouse found early evidence to support this idea. Observing a group of 45 rhesus monkeys in Punta Santiago (Puerto Rico), he concluded that the monkeys tended to scratch themselves more nervously when they were among hierarchically superior individuals and with relative strangers, with whom they did not yet have strong social connections. As a result, this appeared to change the nature of the interaction, with the other monkey demonstrating gentler behavior.

attracting attention

Inspired by this discovery, Whitehouse set out to see whether human stress signals could also alter individuals’ reactions in our favor – perhaps with empathic reactions.

In addition to the skin scratching exhibited by other primates, humans have many subtle behaviors associated with anxiety, which include touching the face and hair, twisting the mouth, licking the lips, and biting the nails. All of them could indicate our sense of vulnerability and evoke kinder reactions from others.

To find out if this is true, Whitehouse’s team began by asking 23 study participants to take the “Social Stress Test” – an anxiety-inducing routine in which participants have to go through a fake job interview, with a presentation three minutes demonstrating why they are ideal candidates and an on-site mental arithmetic test.

Another 133 participants were then asked to rate videos of the fake interviews, with questions about each person’s apparent stress level and how much they liked the people they were watching. In parallel, psychologists counted how many times participants showed nonverbal signs of stress.

As expected, the people who rated the videos were able to predict the respondents’ stress level, apparently due to these characteristic non-verbal cues. More importantly, these perceptions influenced – for the better – the assessment of how pleasant the respondents were. The more respondents showed signs of stress, the more captivating they were to people watching their videos.

“This tells us that these behaviors are not just meaningless by-products of stress, but actually have communicative functions,” says Whitehouse.

red face

Whitehouse’s study aligns with experiments examining the effects caused by someone blushing with embarrassment.

Many people are uncomfortable when their sense of shame is presented so openly – but like the nervous expressions studied by Whitehouse, our red faces can actually improve how we are perceived by others.

One example is the recent study by Christopher Thorstenson, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the State of New York, in the United States. In a series of experiments, Thorstenson presented pictures of embarrassed people with captions describing awkward social situations.

The researcher then asked the participants about the people’s reactions. For example, “you find out these people are lying – which face looks more embarrassed?” and “these people are apologizing for rigging a test – which apology seems more sincere?”

Thorstenson found that a slightly flushed face increased participants’ ratings of shame and sincerity and made it more likely that the person would be forgiven for the transgression. “It signals pacification to others,” he says.

And unlike other non-verbal cues like facial expressions, a red face cannot easily be faked. That’s why it’s considered a sign of honesty, which in turn makes you more likable.

Whether you’re biting your lips nervously or glowing like a sign, it might be worth showing some emotional authenticity.

unnoticed signals

Leah Mayo, a professor at the Center for Social and Affective Neuroscience at the University of Linköping in Sweden, was intrigued by the results obtained by Whitehouse. Her research has examined the characteristic facial expressions associated with stress, and she suspects that people’s reactions to our nonverbal cues are context-dependent.

When someone gives a talk or a presentation, for example, the reasons why we might be feeling nervous are obvious—and this knowledge of the situation leads the other person to feel more empathy. “In this case, you might get a protective reaction,” she agrees.

But the reaction may not be the same if someone sees us frowning and shivering in the office, having no idea of ​​the source of our concerns, according to Mayo. In these situations, observers can easily mistake signs of stress for hostility or anger, and we may need to explain further to help them read the cues correctly.

Clearly, we need to be careful about making too broad generalizations from this research. But Whitehouse hopes his study can at least offer some relief to people nervous about a presentation or job interview, which is the specific context of his study.

“A nice takeaway from this research is that sometimes it’s okay to be and look stressed,” he says. “You don’t have to keep trying to suppress your stress.” As long as you still manage to spread your knowledge and competence, you won’t be judged harshly for showing your nerves.

When you allow your feelings to be more transparent, you may also find that the experience feels less frightening. Whitehouse points to a separate study that found that people who show their stress more openly tend to overcome this discomfort more quickly than those who hide their anxiety.

He suggests that altering the behavior of others may offer a helping mechanism. “Producing stressful behaviors can generate a more cooperative reaction, which in turn can allow the individual to recover from stress much more quickly.”

There is also strong evidence that our thinking about stress can determine its consequences. People who find anxiety energizing tend to perform better on difficult tasks than those who fear this feeling and find it fundamentally disabling. Recognition of the social value of anxiety may be one more reason to look at our discomfort a little more positively.

I have certainly found that this stance can help in my public speaking. Once I learned to accept my nervousness before lectures, I stopped feeling anxious about my anxiety.

The result has been that I can now focus more mental energy on the message I want to deliver, with the security of knowing that my audience will react with more human warmth than I could have imagined.

This text was originally published here.