Techniques for Keeping Your Voice From Shaking While Speaking

Keeping your voice steady while speaking publicly can be challenging. Anxiety is often the cause of a "shaking" voice while facing an audience, regardless if it's a new group of people or addressing a TV camera with an untold number of people watching. Certain practices can be developed over time to ease this tension into a controlled sense of endearment. Anxiety exercises can be both mental and physical, and if practiced properly, extremely beneficial to those who need a boost in confidence.

Visualization Exercises

• Boosting your confidence in the mirror helps in last-second preparation.

  Visualization exercises are useful if preparing for a stressful speaking moment. Your external personality is a direct personification of your subconscious. This includes your ability to feel stress, love and happiness. Visualizing exercises capitalize on the positive and drown out the negative. By focusing on love and happiness, you have the potential to forget about the stress. Remember, it works both ways, but in a controlled setting it's really not to hard boost your confidence to a palpable degree. Visualization exercises are designed for the present, and are not as effective when preparing for future events.

Biofeedback

• Biofeedback takes visualization exercises one step further. Instead of focusing on the mental aspects of the anxiety that may cause your voice to shake, biofeedback focuses on the physical attributes of anxiety. Lowering your blood pressure is a key example of how biofeedback has immediate results. By keeping track of your heartbeat in a 10-second period, then multiplying by six gives you your beats per minute. To put things in perspective, the average adult resting heart rate is 60-100 beats per minute. If your heart beat is to high, you are experiencing anxiety which directly contributes to your shaking voice.

Eye Contact with the Crowd

• Composure is critical when trying to avoid anxious situations. Nervousness can easily take over and suddenly you are forgetting lines, mixing words and your voice becomes shaky. Instead of glazing into the crowd and speaking as if you are talking to a wall, make eye contact with those you can see closer to the front. Making eye contact will boost composure and narrow the large crowd down to the one person at whom you are focusing.

Beta Blockers

• Beta blockers, specifically ones that block β1 and β2 receptors, can be used to reduce your heart rate by blocking effects of norepinephrine and epinephrine, which are released from the sympathetic nervous system. There are two types of beta receptors, beta 1 and beta 2. Beta 1 receptors are in the heart muscles, while beta 2 receptors are located in the blood vessels, or cardiovascular system. If you consider taking beta blockers to reduce your anxiety while speaking, consider non-cardio selective Beta blockers, or brands that treat both beta 1 and 2 receptors. These types of beta blockers are commonly prescribed to reduce high blood pressure, which can cause anxiety and hypertension.