To manage anxiety while speaking, adopt the 'One Idea, One Breath' model. The key is to make your out-breath significantly longer than your in-breath while delivering a single idea. This extended exhalation activates your parasympathetic nervous system, lowering your heart rate.

Instead of using psychological 'mind tricks' (a top-down approach), focus on physiological interventions first. By controlling your breathing and vocal mechanics from the 'bottom-up,' you regulate your nervous system directly, which in turn calms your mind.

Attempting to control anxious thoughts with more thoughts ("top-down") is often ineffective. A more efficient strategy is to first regulate your body's physiology through techniques like controlled breathing ("bottom-up"), which then sends safety signals to the brain, making cognitive shifts easier.

Three accessible daily practices effectively regulate the nervous system. These include breathwork for at least five minutes, humming to activate the parasympathetic (relaxation) response, and gentle, rhythmic rocking to provide a soothing effect.

Functions we consider involuntary, like heart rate, immune response, and body temperature, can be consciously influenced. By controlling the breath, we can directly tap into the autonomic nervous system, enabling us to shift between a 'fight or flight' state and a 'rest and digest' state to manage stress and improve health.

Deep belly breathing, with a focus on a long exhalation, slows the autonomic nervous system and calms physical symptoms of anxiety like a shaky voice. It's a physiological hack to manage the fight-or-flight response.

Dr. Andrew Weil's 4-7-8 breathing method—a simple, free yogic practice—is described as the most powerful anti-anxiety tool he's found, capable of lowering heart rate and outperforming many pharmaceuticals with consistent use.

To manage public speaking anxiety, communication expert Matt Abrahams advises focusing on deep belly breathing where your exhale is twice as long as your inhale. Just two or three of these breaths can slow your nervous system, lower your heart rate, and normalize your voice, providing an immediate calming effect.

The parasympathetic nervous system (the "parachute" or calming response) activates faster than the sympathetic (fight-or-flight) system. You can begin to trigger this calming, vagal nerve response almost instantaneously, within a single controlled breath.