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How My Electric Toothbrush Made Me a Better Public Speaker

I still get really nervous, but now it’s a positive

David Epstein

Apr 4
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This is an ode to my electric toothbrush and its self-regulatory powers. But first, some background:

When I was a college 800-meter runner, I used to get nervous before every race. Like, sweaty-palms-thumping-heart nervous. (At the risk of gross TMI, I’d also feel a compulsion to spit a lot.) It definitely affected my performance. If a race wasn’t until late in the day, I’d feel completely emotionally exhausted before it even started.

For a few years, I hoped (and expected) that this would dissipate with experience. It didn’t. But I did learn how to manage it.

I created a fixed warm-up routine that budgeted for moments where I’d check in with myself, so to speak. If my heart was racing, I’d take a few minutes to use breathing exercises and relaxation techniques I learned from the chapter on autogenic training in this book.

In my final year of racing — by far my best, when I was twice All-East — the routine came to feel like a source of power. The self check-ins were the most important part. It gave me chances to pause and step away from the escalating tension and reset. It got to the point, in fact, where it became kind of fun to experience healthy nerves in those moments; I’d think about how I was excited (and anxious) because I cared about this, and it was something worth doing. It got to the point where I would’ve felt worried if I wasn’t nervous.

My Electric Toothbrush Revelation

For almost a decade after I stopped racing, I didn’t have regular moments that caused that kind of acute sweaty-palm response. And then I wrote my first book, and it took on a life beyond what I expected, and people invited me to speak at things. So returned the sweaty palms and the thumping heart. In the hours before my turn to speak (or days, at an event like TED), I’d burn through a lot of nervous energy. You can actually see, right after I finished a TED talk, I did the “phew!” gesture.

I love sharing my interests with people in talks, but if it was going to require that much adrenaline, I wasn’t going to be doing it very often.

Enter electric toothbrush, stage left.

A few years ago, I switched from a manual to an electric toothbrush. It has a feature where if you’re brushing too forcefully, it alters the vibrations to signal that you should chill out a little. I’m not sure what dental benefits I can attribute to the toothbrush, but immediately I realized that when I was on the road to give a talk, the thing was vibrating like a maniac. BZZZZZZZZ!

Apparently, I was so anxious or hyped up that I was pushing really hard with the toothbrush. I definitely wasn’t trying to do that, and would not have been conscious of it if not for that chill-out warning.

It prompted me to step back, and “check my instruments,” as I think of it. Typically, once I slow down, I’ll notice that I’m squeezing the brush really hard, and my feet are fidgeting, and my neck feels tense. Once I recognize it, it’s not too hard to step back and recenter, and loosen my grip. But just like when I was racing, I didn’t naturally take time to notice. I had to implement check-in systems.

So — and this sounds ridiculous — the day I'm giving a talk, I now brush my teeth like five times, because it’s my self check-in. If I get a lot of buzzing, I know I need to slow down. I still get nervous, and that’s fine; I think some nervous energy is great for performance. But I’m no longer overwhelmed by speaking nerves on the day of a talk. The result is that I feel equipped to do more of the work.

The moral of the story is: brush your teeth five times a day. Wait, that’s not the moral, although it’s also fine. The moral is: if you get nervous before a presentation, or action of any kind, it might be worth figuring out how to monitor your own nerves, and scheduling a few moments for a self check-in. (I swear I receive nothing from Big Toothbrush). It has helped me, anyway, and left more of my adrenaline for game time.

Thank you for reading. If you liked this post, please share it — here's a link. And I'd love to hear about your "electric toothbrush" moment. What's your strategy for self-regulating when you're anxious? Let me know in the comments.

If a friend sent you this post, or you found it on social media, I'd love it if you'd subscribe here.

Until next week...

David

P.S. For more wide-ranging thoughts (and occasional reels of me learning to shuffle;), you can follow me on Instagram, or Twitter.

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27 Comments

  • Lance Knobel
    The idea of a personal check-in is valuable. But I'd add a wrinkle, drawn from my experience (many years ago) as a very serious young musician. Like many musicians (I was a trumpet player), I had a well-crafted warm-up routine before performances. My t…
    See more
    • 6w
    View 1 more reply
    • Author
      David Epstein
      Hey Lance, love this note. Thinking back to running, the bigger the race was, the more certain I could be that my warm-up would be disrupted. Penn Relays, for example, which is one of the biggest, forced runners to wait in this holding pen before races…
      See more
      • 6w
  • Sean D'Souza
    The thing to notice is that you don't get nervous using the toothbrush.
    Using the toothbrush seems "normal" to you. As does walking, or driving. Yet, none of these tasks are "normal". A person who has had a stroke may need to learn to use a toothbrus…
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    • 6w
    • Author
      David Epstein
      Hi Sean, I appreciate your concern about my toothpaste bill! And I appreciate your note, and both agree and disagree about your point on "thinking." (If you're not referencing Sian Beilock's work on performance under pressure here, you'd definitely be …
      See more
      • 6w
      • Edited
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  • Matt Thomas
    Hey David, I love this post! I played D1 Baseball through college, so all that you said about pre-preformance stress really resonates. I tried a few strategically replaced reminders. First, each year I spent months making sure I chose the perfect walk …
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    • Author
      David Epstein
      Hey Matt, this is awesome, thanks for sharing it. And I'll again drop below a podcast in which I interviewed Sian Beilock, who studies performance under pressure, because a few things you mention here resonate with that episode. (Writing out a mantra —…
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  • William Murphy
    Hi David, thanks for this. This post resonated with me as I suffer from social anxiety myself and I've never really got to grips with it! I wonder do you think the Peak Performance book that you reference above would be helpful for more than just perfo…
    See more
    • 6w
    • Edited
    • Author
      David Epstein
      Hey William, I just wrote a lengthy response to this, and somehow it deleted when I hit post! So I'm going to try again, a little more succinct: As to the book, I'm not entirely sure. It was given to me by a runner I was training with, and he recommend…
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    View 2 more replies
  • Eryk Korcelli-Olejniczak
    I love the idea of instant feedback. I think the same applies to many breathing "techniques". By observing breathing patterns that are abnormal we can objectively assess that something is not right and then change it accordingly. Arguably tough the too…
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    • Author
      David Epstein
      Haha...Eryk, I'm glad you didn't notice the "phew" until now! And that's a great point about observing breathing patterns. I think sometimes I can pick up on physical cues directly, but sometimes, for whatever reason, I just don't until the toothbrush …
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      • 6w
    View 1 more reply
  • Nellie Ide
    Hi David, thanks for sharing this, and I can definitely relate to that pre-race anxiety that can become overwhelming. I also had a precise routine that I would do before each ski race, but I would do it rather unconsciously and automatically, not imple…
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    • 6w
    • Author
      David Epstein
      Hey Nellie, that's a great and tough question. (How did the end of your season go?) I was in the same exact situation. For a while after I finished competing, I wasn't really in those sort of acute high-pressure situations. The first thing that got me …
      See more
      • 6w
      • Edited
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  • Eric Janik
    If this were the New York Post, the headline would read "Electric toothbrush enhances effective public speaking."
    • 2w
  • Bohu Tang
    *By the way, this newsletter is sponsored by Big Toothbrush and please use code IHAVERANGE when you checkout.
    Haha, anyhow, that would be a cool commercial for e-tooth brush.…
    See more
    • 6w
    • Author
      David Epstein
      Hahaha...I'm waiting for the product where I don't even have to move my hands or open my mouth;)
      Speaking of athletes and overthinking, you might enjoy this podcast, where I chatted with an expert on the subject:…
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