This Is Why It's So Hard to Sound Normal When You're Nervous

Anxiety and awkwardness create a lot of mental noise and distraction, which can drain mental resources from other processes, like finding and using the correct words. “If you experience strong emotion, fear, or any negativity-based feeling, it makes it harder to figure out these words,” Tashiro says. Part of the reason is that awkward people engage in bottom-up brain processing, Tashiro says. They tend to see situations as an accumulation of details to absorb. “In top-down processing, a person goes to a party and their first thought is that the tone of the room is positive or neutral. Most people who are bottom-up [in their brain processing] are putting together the pieces and are in a rush to put it together.

Awkward people, who are self-critical and analyze environments for potential threats to their insecurities, are doing more mental work than non-awkward people capable of “joining in the sing-song of the moment,” Tashiro says. “Especially because of speed demands, it’s amazing how many cues [awkward] people are taking in,” he adds. When a person is not able to focus on speech, non-word placeholders, like “ugh” and “um” sneak in, and “Nice to meet you” becomes “Niece to feed you.

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