How To Control Blushing

For many of us, blushing starts in childhood. You feel all eyes on you and the heat races to your cheeks. The second you are aware you are starting to blush, your cheeks flush hotter. It’s a vicious cycle that for many follows them into adulthood and can have a crippling effect on confidence. But why do we blush, and how can we stop ourselves from getting caught in a habit that creates obstacles in our social and professional lives?

Belle About Town spoke to Caroline, Goyder, an expert speaker and voice trainer. Having worked for more than a decade at London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama as a voice coach, Caroline’s TEDx debut on The Surprising Secret to Speaking with Confidence has been viewed more than ten million times. Clients have included Cabinet Ministers, a Queen, the magician Dynamo, and businesses as varied as Mastercard, Netflix, and Balfour Beatty. She’s the author of best-selling books Gravitas and Find Your Voice and the creator of two new self-paced courses Master Your Speaking and Master Your Meetings.

Caroline told Belle: “There you are, under pressure in the spotlight, in that moment that matters, in front of that person who matters. 

“But suddenly as their attention turns to you, you feel the blush, you go bright red. When you are blushing all you can do is obsess about the fact that all you can think about is that they know you are blushing, and they are thinking you’re uncomfortable – you’re thinking about them thinking about that, and your colour deepens to a deep mauve and that makes you feel worse and arrrrghh…ENOUGH!”

So when you are caught in this vicious circle – what on earth can you do to calm down, slow down and get the control back?

“I don’t promise to have all the answers,” says Caroline. “I’m a bit of a blusher myself at times. I’m a pale skinned strawberry blonde – it goes with the turf.  I can’t stop the blush entirely – but I have lots of experience of how to manage it!”

Caroline Goyder’s blushing advice

Counterintuitively perhaps, the first thing I’d encourage you to do is embrace the blush.

Research shows us that people trust people who blush. Blushing is actually a lovely human quality, because it shows you care about what others think. It shows you have a developed sense of shame (a really good moral human quality) and empathy. 

But I know this won’t convince you – blushing when everyone is staring at you is not something most people want to embrace. 

How to break the blushing cycle

Step 1 – Get the attention off you for a second. The quickest way to do that is to ask a question – it’s fine to ask a question back to a question if you do it confidently, and then the eyes turn away from you for a moment. Phew, you can breathe. 

Step 2 – Consciously relax your face – particularly the muscles around your eyes and jaw –  they send a message of tension to your brain. If you relax your face the blush is more likely to die down. 

Step 3 – If you have some water drink it. Take a moment to be in your senses, come back to the moment. Slow down your nervous system, tell it you’re safe. It takes seconds. 

Step 4 –  Then most importantly of all get your own attention off your heated face, and focus it out on the room. Blushing gets worse when we are locked into the “thinking what they’re thinking” cycle, you may have noticed how it deepens your colour from pink to puce. 

The key is to break the cycle by consciously noticing something out there in the space that you’ve never noticed before. Really place your attention out. Something that someone is wearing. Something in the room, a painting, the carpet and a thing that takes your attention off yourself.

 If you need to be looking at the audience it might be that someone has great glasses, or five people are wearing red. It gets your attention out of your psychodrama and into the room. And when your attention is off yourself, you get back to normal.

I hope you find that with these tips you can flip from blush back to cool and calm, and start to enjoy those moments of visibility more. 

• To find out more about Caroline’s courses and services, click here.