Public speaking is often listed among our greatest fears. As Jerry Seinfeld once joked, at a funeral, the average person would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.
I have spent a truly impressive amount of my life trying to avoid looking foolish. Most people would agree.
There’s a spectrum when it comes to avoiding public humiliation. Being laughed at is generally considered to be an unpleasant experience. But there’s even a word for an extreme fear of it. Gelotophobia is a personality trait characterized by a disproportionate fear of being laughed at by other people (Torres-Marín et al., 2017).
Unfortunately, learning almost anything requires a period of being bad at it. If we want creativity, innovation, and play in our lives, learning to tolerate the discomfort of looking foolish is an important part of our adult development.
And looking foolish may actually be good for your mental health. Here are three reasons why.
1. It teaches your brain that embarrassment is survivable.
Your brain is built to care what other people think. Humans are social creatures, and belonging has always mattered for survival.
Research on social-evaluative threat shows that situations that threaten our social standing can trigger measurable psychological and physiological stress responses, including shame, anxiety, changes in heart rate, and increased cortisol (Bosch et al., 2009).
In other words, looking ridiculous can feel like a much bigger threat than it is.
Every time you do something awkward and survive it, your brain gets new information: I looked foolish and people saw me, but nothing terrible happened.
Avoiding embarrassment can make your world smaller, but when you can increase your window of tolerance for feeling foolish, your world and opportunities within it expand.
2. Being bad at something gives your brain something new to do.
Neuroplasticity means your brain has the capacity to change. The adage “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” is inaccurate, according to research. No matter where you are in the lifespan, if you have a brain, there is still possibility to change. But in order to make changes in your life (and in your brain), you’ll need to expose your brain to new stimuli and disrupt its predictive and pattern-seeking functions.
Learning new skills is an instant “auto-pilot deactivate” button. When you learn a new skill, your brain has to stay present and adapt in real time. Research on skill acquisition has found both functional and structural changes in the brain as people practice and learn new things (Dayan & Cohen, 2011).
But in order to train your brain, you’ll need to become willing to be bad at new things.
3. Looking foolish gives you more access to play.
It’s easy to assume play is the domain of children. But research on adult play suggests that play can contribute to subjective and psychological well-being (Colston, 2023).
The benefits of play are well documented; play can help your brain problem-solve, and laughter itself has even been associated with reductions in cortisol (Kramer & Leitao, 2023). But play is inaccessible to a brain stuck on hypervigilance and perfectionism.
So if you want to train your brain and give yourself access to a lot more options, try running a low-stakes experiment. Intentionally trip over something in public. Maybe accidentally drop something in the grocery store. Then pay attention to what happens in the aftermath. If your experiment is low-stakes enough, the result will disconfirm your brain’s belief that looking foolish is harmful to your health.
You just might discover that looking foolish is far less dangerous than spending your life trying to avoid it.
And you’ll have a lot more fun in the process.
