I experience performance anxiety and recently the anxiety has attached to my breathing and speaking. There was an initial incident where I panicked on a zoom work meeting while giving a presentation. My chest tightened, my heart started pounding, I felt dizzy – it really felt it required all my strength to push each word out of my chest at the expense of my breath. With all eyes on me I also panicked about the shame that would come with it and didn’t want anyone to notice so I cut my presentation short. That was a few weeks ago and now every time I am about to join a call I am experiencing the same physical symptoms again and I am caught in a loop.

My unintentional model on this is:

C: Previously experienced tight chest and difficulty breathing on a call
T: I can’t breathe
F: Panic
A: Tense up and try to take control of my body
R: Intensify the physical symptoms

The other day I had a phone interview scheduled for a potential new job so I was looking for an intentional model to get me through the call:

C: Previously experienced tight chest and difficulty breathing on a call
T: I will always be able to breathe
F: Calm
A: Body relaxes and lessens the nervous symptoms
R: Confident job interview

The thought worked during the day in the lead up, however, 5 minutes before the call while I was waiting to join the meeting it felt like my body just got a life of its own and the anxiety completely overwhelmed me. It got too much and I couldn’t answer the phone when it rang and have now potentially missed out on a job opportunity.

I understand the concept on allowing your emotion but a phone interview or a work meeting is not really the time and place to allow and process my emotion when there are eyes and ears on me having to “perform”. Where is the gap in my model, was my intentional thought not strong enough?