Q: I get really nervous when I give a speech in front of a crowd. Would it help to have a couple of drinks before I go up?
A: Some recent research suggests that yeah, alcohol will reduce your anxiety before a speech. The drawback is that it will make your speech worse. If you care about your actual performance, this isn’t a good tradeoff.
INTRODUCTION
Some researchers at two universities in Germany noted in previous research that social anxiety and alcohol use disorders tend to happen together a lot.
This makes sense. People who are regularly anxious may use alcohol to relax and stop worrying.
This is especially true in social scenarios with people who have social anxiety. Alcohol can help you loosen up and enjoy talking to people, right?
Turns out the research is mixed on whether alcohol actually reduces anxiety in social settings.
- Even if it does, it might be a placebo effect.
- But if it doesn’t work, then an anxious person who drinks is just going to be an anxious person who is also drunk.
One of the most anxiety-provoking scenarios for many people is public speaking.
If alcohol reduces anxiety, then maybe having a drink or two before going up to speak will help your anxiety go down, and this will allow you to give a better speech.
The researchers tested this question and released the results in Behaviour Research and Therapy in 2017.
EXPERIMENT
The researchers recruited people with social anxiety with ads in newspapers, flyers, and emails throughout their universities.
- The participants excluded anyone with an alcohol use disorder, liver problems, or who was pregnant, or had never tried alcohol, from being in the study.
- They also recruited a similar number of people who didn’t have social anxiety.
Overall, there were 99 people with social anxiety, and 78 without social anxiety.
On their first visit to the lab, the recruits conducted a number of psychological surveys to determine levels of depression, anxiety, alcohol use, social fears, and other diagnoses.
The recruits were also instructed to go home and eat a certain diet to optimize the second lab visit (no caffeine, no alcohol for a day before the experiment, and eat a light meal four hours before the experiment).
Then, the recruits came back for the second lab visit.
On the second lab visit, some of the participants were given orange juice to drink, some were given nothing to drink, and some were given a mixture of vodka and orange juice intended to get them at a blood alcohol content of 0.07%, based on their body weight.
This is a level that has been shown to induce some of the effects of alcohol without severely impairing performance on behavioral tasks.
The vodka was diluted to the point where participants didn’t know whether their drink had vodka or not.
Then, participants were told that they would be giving a speech on the pros and cons of the death penalty. They were told that they would be observed and judged on their speech.
YIKES!
Right before they gave the speech, they got some surveys on how they were feeling.
The speech was 3 minutes long in front of an audience of two individuals.
After the speech, both the participant AND the two individuals observing the speech wrote down ratings of a few factors during the speech related to performance:
- Gaze direction
- Voice quality
- Length of verbal ideas
- Visual discomfort
- Flow
The judges of the speech did NOT know whether the participant had alcohol or not.
Then, the participants were given another round of psychological and physiological measurements, and the experiment was over.
RESULTS
The researchers made sure that the various stages of their study had their intended effect:
Participant blood alcohol content reached approximately the desired level at the desired time.
The speech did indeed increase anxiety and heart rate, particularly for those with social anxiety.
Then we come to the main questions:
- Did the alcohol reduce participants’ anxiety? Yes.
- In the two groups (the social anxiety group and the non-anxious group), those who got alcohol were the least anxious before, during, and after the speech.
- Interestingly, those who got orange juice also got a reduction in anxiety, possibly because they thought it might have alcohol in it.
- This suggests that there might be at least some of a placebo effect there.
- No benefit was found from drinking alcohol on speaking performance.
- In fact, for both socially anxious and non-socially anxious participants, alcohol had a detrimental effect on scores.
CONCLUSION
This study suggests that alcohol is going to hurt your public speaking abilities.
If you have social anxiety, sure, the alcohol will reduce your anxiety. However, your speech will be worse.
The researchers suggested that the result of negative evaluation after performance may be even more drinking, turning into a vicious cycle (alcohol -> worse performance -> more anxiety -> alcohol).
If you really want to do well on a speech, it may be necessary to embrace your anxiety, or reduce it in different ways, rather than try to get rid of it with alcohol.
My advice: have a drink or two after the speech, not before.
Reference
Stevens, S., Cooper, R., Bantin, T., Hermann, C., & Gerlach, A. L. (2017). Feeling safe but appearing anxious: Differential effects of alcohol on anxiety and social performance in individuals with social anxiety disorder. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 94, 9-18. Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005796717300864
