When my younger sister called in November 2022 to say she was getting married, I was slow to connect the dots.

“YAAAAY!” I screeched into the phone. Meg had been my maid of honour a couple of years earlier, and now I’d be hers. I turned and roared over my shoulder, “Meg and Ken got engaged!” in the general direction of my husband, Nick.

From 10 feet away, he grinned and winced, possibly reflecting on his own marriage to a human car alarm. However, after a giddy few minutes of chatter, the realisation hit me like a bridal bouquet to the face: “Oh, crap.”

“Yep,” Meg said.

“I have to give a speech at your wedding, don’t I?”

“Yep,” Meg confirmed.

And just like that, my excitement mutated into 270 days of dread.

Some people get butterflies in front of an audience. For me, it’s killer bees. My extreme fear of public speaking, or glossophobia, isn’t mere nervousness – it’s a personal horror show.

My symptoms are intense: chest pain, a churning stomach, and knees so trembly I’d make a newborn giraffe look graceful. As in any good scary movie, the danger feels real.

Whether it’s five people or 50, my nervous system floods with adrenaline like I’m facing Hannibal Lecter instead of some barely interested co-workers.

Why such an extreme reaction? Science has my back. The human brain is wired to perceive public speaking as a genuine threat, a response rooted in our evolutionary history.

When we look at an audience, all those eyes staring back can trigger the same primal fear our ancestors felt on the savannah. As comedian Deborah Frances-White said in her 2015 Ted Talk, “the fear of public speaking is essentially the fear of being eaten because audiences look a lot like lions”.

Logically, I know I’m not in mortal danger, but my lizard brain disagrees. The fear is bad enough, but the social pressure – the dread of being judged and the lack of control – makes it worse.

I panic about losing my train of thought, about saying something stupid that gets immortalised in a group chat, and about mispronouncing words I should know. (A co-worker once called me “brave” for using the word niche in a presentation. Is it nitch or neesh? I learned a dozen synonyms so I never have to say it again.)

My fear is irrational, but I’m not alone.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld once joked that for many people, their top fear isn’t death – it’s public speaking. “This means, to the average person, if you have to be at a funeral, you would rather be in the casket than doing the eulogy,” he quipped.

Of course, plenty of things are scarier than public speaking. In the 2024 Chapman University Survey of American Fears, nearly 29% of respondents named it as a top phobia. It didn’t even crack the top 10 list.

Still, for people who do have this fear, it can be paralysing – even for those accustomed to the spotlight.

Take Adele. The singer-songwriter once projectile vomited on someone during a concert. Actor Bill Hader revealed he would hyperventilate and cry before his Saturday Night Live performances. And Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has

© HuffPost