All people, in one situation or another, experience anxiety. Often, a person can immediately see that he is agitated, because he cannot control himself in this state. How do you know if a person is worried or not?

Five main signs of determining excitement in the face

1. When confused, many people blink frequently and their eyes “run” and it is difficult to concentrate in this state. Visual contact with him is completely absent, because he seeks to hide his excitement and takes his eyes off the interlocutor;
2. Most people unknowingly lick or bite their lips;
3. Lips tighten, sometimes the lower one trembles;
4. The face is covered with red spots;
5. 5 crustaceans are greatly enlarged.

Excitement can also be determined by swollen nostrils, by a rapid heartbeat that occurs due to a strong release of adrenaline, in this case a person breathes often and unevenly. Many begin to go all over the body trembling. Hands involuntarily clench into fists. Also, in men, cheek muscles sometimes begin to involuntarily tighten, and sweating increases. More often then the upper lip and forehead are covered. Many people begin to gesticulate intensely.

You can answer the question: how to determine that a person is worried by paying attention to the conversation. Sometimes, even without seeing a person, you can determine that he is excited.

Five main signs of anxiety in the voice:

1. The most obvious sign is a tremor in the voice;
2. Fast paced speech. A person is unable to hide his excitement, so he begins to speak quickly, while making long pauses between words. He himself does not notice this, but the listener can clearly see it;
3. There is dryness in the throat and therefore the person often begins to swallow saliva and cough;
4. The timbre of the voice changes;
5. Often a person begins to speak through his teeth, thus wanting to hide his excitement.

Many people cannot overcome the feeling of excitement. Therefore, having learned how to determine that a person is worried, you can learn, with careful observation, to recognize signs of excitement and help a person with good advice, try to relax the situation and enter into his position.

"Anxious thoughts create big shadows for small things"

Swedish proverb

Anxiety is one of those feelings that we most often try to hide. Whether it works well is another question. Let's find out what signs give you away when trying to hide your feelings, and how to determine that the other person is worried.

Obvious signs that a person is worried

Sometimes gestures, movements and speech betray a person with a head - it is immediately clear that he is very worried:

• trembling in the voice, confused speech and even stuttering. It is not difficult to understand that when a person is worried, he does everything to control himself. But very often it is the voice that betrays the excitement;
• trembling in the knees, fingers, or even the whole body. Trembling of the limbs is the result of the release of “stress hormones” into the body, the initial purpose of which is to prepare the body for physical activity (protection) and increase muscle activity. From such an overstrain, the muscles involuntarily begin to tremble;
• walking back and forth. Excitement often makes a person jump up and randomly move around the room, and the explanation for this is all the same “stress hormones”. Most often it looks like uncontrolled walking back and forth. Sometimes a person stops and, trying to control himself, bites his hands, for example, into the back of a chair;
• running glance. If the interlocutor diligently avoids your gaze, this does not necessarily mean that he is lying. Often a shifty look indicates that the person is worried when talking to you.

Unobvious signs that a person is worried

Sometimes we can keep our emotions under control. But an experienced eye will still determine the excitement by some signs. For instance.

» Understand people

David Lieberman

How do you know if a person is really confident or plays a role well?

Fragment of the book Lieberman D. Alien Soul of Darkness? How to read the mind of any person. - M.: Piter, 2010.

How do you know who is thinking what? How to interpret words and gestures correctly? How to attract allies and identify ill-wishers? How to make the secret clear? These and many other burning questions will be answered not by telepathy, but by psychology. The book describes the application of specific psychological techniques in real life situations. Learn to understand people - and success will follow you relentlessly.

Self-confidence is the first necessary condition for any great undertaking.
Samuel Jackson (1709–1784)

Let's say you're sitting across from a poker player. Is he confident or scared? Is your interlocutor as calm as he wants to seem? Or is your adversary's lawyer really sure of the outcome of the case, or is he just trying to make us all believe it? Use a psychological technique to find out how your interlocutor assesses his chances of success, whether he is confident in himself or holds his own brand.

To better understand the term "self-confidence", let's define its boundaries. Self confidence quite often confused with self-esteem, but these are different concepts and this distinction is very important. Self-confidence refers to a certain situation or area of ​​activity. Self-respect is the ability of a person to like himself and feel worthy of getting good things out of life. It may well be that a person respects himself and treats himself well, but feels insecure in a particular situation or under certain circumstances. It may be the other way around.

For example, an attractive woman is sure that she can easily find an interlocutor in a bar. But at the same time, it is not known how she perceives herself in general and how much she respects herself. A man who respects himself very much may feel like a useless chess player, but this does not prevent him from liking himself. He will show signs of insecurity when playing chess with a superior opponent, but his self-respect will not suffer from this.

A person's self-confidence in a particular situation is based on various factors: on experience, on previous successes or failures, on the feedback we receive in response to our actions, and, of course, on comparing ourselves with others. Self-esteem can affect self-confidence. Research shows that people with high levels of self-esteem feel more comfortable and confident in new situations compared to those with lower levels of self-esteem. However, the converse is not true. A person who attaches great importance to a sense of self-confidence may show signs of high self-esteem that are not backed up by a true sense of self-esteem, which is not always noticeable to the untrained eye. Self-esteem is more manifested in what and how a person does (in the manifestation of his free will), and not in what he claims about this. One could say that self-respect is actually a degree of development of the ego.

Self-esteem and self-confidence are different psychic energies, which each in their own way affect the state of a person. Of course, it would be very interesting to trace what factors and how can influence self-confidence, but we will leave this issue outside the scope of our consideration. We will only be interested in how confident a person is in himself. How and why he came to this is not so important in this case. So, let's return to the main topic of our conversation and consider how exactly you can determine the degree of confidence of a person.

When we are nervous or under stress, our ability to concentrate is greatly reduced. Has it ever happened to you that you meet a person at a party and immediately forget his name? Such signs of distraction and inability to concentrate on what is happening are evidence that at the moment you lacked confidence.

Assessment of the degree of self-confidence

Now we will take a closer look at how a confident person looks and talks. As a result, it will immediately become clear who is confident and who is not. Depending on the situation, we can resort to one or more techniques, pay attention to certain signals.

To correctly determine the degree of confidence of a person, you need to find signs that a person is only pretending to be confident. Of course, we know what is inherent in the behavior of a confident person: a smile, eye contact, etc. However, all this is very easy to portray, so we will talk about not so obvious signs that are still noticeable.

Sign 1. Physical condition

At the moment of a very strong fright, when a person feels extremely uncomfortable, one can observe two different options for his behavior: either he will become extremely absent-minded, his eyes will run from side to side, he will make many chaotic movements, become overexcited, or he will fall into stupor, like a rabbit before a boa constrictor. Let's see what else can happen to a person when he is afraid.

"Then in the heat, then in the cold." The face of a person in a situation of fear may suddenly become very red or pale. Also pay attention to the breathing rate and increased sweating. In addition, try to notice if the person is trying to control their breathing, to calm down. Attempts to cope with this condition can be seen in deep breaths, loud breathing.

When we worry, we take everything literally. When we lack confidence, our brains are too busy to notice the hidden meaning of what is being said. For example, in difficult situations, we do not perceive sarcastic expressions, because the ability to think indirectly requires additional energy expenditure.

Difficult to swallow. In a situation of fear, it becomes difficult to swallow saliva, so you should pay attention to this. Actors who want to portray grief or fear often use this technique to show that they are "suffocating" with emotion. Coughing may indicate the same and is a sign of nervousness. Anxiety provokes the secretion of mucus in the throat. A speaker who is nervous often clears his throat before starting a new sentence.

Blink. When a person is nervous, the frequency of blinking increases. In News of the Week, October 21, 1996, Boston College of Neuropsychology professor Joe Tese described his observations of the presidential debate between Bob Dole and Bill Clinton in the first round of the presidential election.

The normal blink rate of a person on television ranges from 31 to 50 times per minute. Bob Dole blinked approximately 147 times per minute, that is, 3 times per second. When asked if he thought things had improved in the country over the past four years, he blinked even faster. Clinton blinked an average of 99 times per minute, and the highest frequency of blinking (117 times per minute) coincided with the question of increasing drug addiction among young people. Tese also noted that, according to his observations, in the past five election campaigns, the candidate with a higher blink rate lost.

Sign 2. Focus of attention

Let's imagine an athlete, musician or artist in the process of performing a number. He does not think about himself at all, he is completely absorbed in what he is doing. He does not think about pain in the body. His task completely absorbed his attention. For example, a basketball player who wants to hit the ball in the basket. Extraneous things do not exist for him at the moment. He is obsessed with the goal and does not think about himself. He does not realize himself and does not feel himself, in the foreground is his intention. If a person begins to pay attention to himself, his self-awareness distracts him from what he is doing. Attention at each moment of time is divided between what is happening around and the perception of oneself.

A self-confident person is able to devote his full attention to the object and allow his "I" to disappear. A person who is nervous constantly monitors himself because he is anxious and afraid of losing control of himself. The only thing that can help him is attention to his own actions. He watches literally every step he takes, what he does and says. What we normally do automatically, such as folding our hands, choosing a position, becomes the subject of attention and control. All his actions become conscious. Imagine what a resource of attention this requires. It simply may not be enough for what a person is trying to do. In this way, you can find out that a person lacks confidence.

At an interrogation, a meeting or a date, a person wants to smoke. If he is calm, confident and feels that the situation is under control, he does not need to follow the movements of his hand at all. And if a person doubts that he can perform this habitual action automatically, looks at his hand, at a cigarette, then it becomes clear that in this situation he feels insecure.

Let's continue to look at the psychological mechanisms of self-confidence. When a person masters any type of activity, he goes through four stages: unconscious incompetence when a person does not realize that they cannot perform an action properly; conscious incompetence when a person realizes that he lacks the proper skills and abilities to be effective and successful; conscious competence when a person understands that he can act quite successfully, but for this he needs to constantly control his actions, unconscious competence when a person can perform the right actions and this does not require his full or even partial attention.

Consider an example: a person who masters a gearbox while driving a car. This example illustrates all four stages well. Actions that at first seem completely incomprehensible, eventually become an automatic skill.

The second, third and fourth stages give us an idea of ​​what happens to a person's competence and self-confidence. (We do not take into account the first stage, since the person does not even understand what he should do.)

You are talking to a colleague. Suddenly you notice her picking up a can of lemonade. She looks at her hand, which brings the jar to her mouth, then watches the reverse movements of the hand. Your colleague is nervous and therefore not sure that she can do without close attention what she has done a thousand times - a sip of lemonade. A distinctive feature of uncertainty is the transition from unconscious to conscious competence, that is, attention to habitual automatic actions increases.

If you know what to watch for, confidence or lack of confidence is easy to spot. Just notice if the person is focused on themselves and their actions. Consider the following example.

A lonely man walks into a bar, hoping to meet a woman there. If he considers himself attractive and confident, he will consider women in a bar. If he is not sure of his attractiveness, he will be most worried about how they perceive him. In other words, the focus of his attention shifts depending on the degree of his self-confidence. Lack of self-confidence leads to the fact that a person begins to consciously control the simplest actions. At the same time, the movements become clumsy and mechanical, and attention is focused on what impression he makes on others.

We often come across this in our own experience. For example, when a person is sure of what he is talking about, his main task is to convey the meaning of what was said to the listeners and he cares little about how he looks. When we are interested in getting things done, we first of all want to be sure that others understand us correctly. If we ourselves are not confident enough, we pay attention to our words and actions and think about how they will be perceived. We follow our every word and movement.

Additional Features: Perception Management

When a person is nervous, but does not want to show it, he can apply what is called perception management presenting a certain image to others in order to achieve the desired result. Above, we discussed what you need to pay attention to in order to understand whether a person feels confident or not. Now we'll look at something else. We'll be looking for signs that he's trying portray confidence. We know that trying to portray confidence is not confidence. If he wants to fool you by hiding those signs of insecurity that we discussed above, you will catch him if you know what a person who is bluffing looks like.

Sign 1. Overcompensation

A person who wants to influence the perception of others overacts and tries beyond measure to look confident. If you look for this sign, you will see it quite clearly. Stuff like this always pops up. Remember, a confident person is not interested in how he is perceived. He is not concerned with his image, while one who is involved in the management of perception goes out of his way to impress those around him.

The card player made a big bet and continues to raise it. Does he really have good cards? If he is bluffing, he will try to feign confidence. He will put his money in quickly. But if he really had good cards, what would he do? He would have thought a little, not in a hurry to make a bet, showing that he was not so sure of his cards. Mike Caro, a well-known authority on poker strategy, mentioned such moments in his book Poker Tells (2003). It's human nature to do this kind of thing: someone who is bluffing needs to look confident, and someone who has a really good chance of winning will pretend to have a weak card.

Whether it's a game of poker or real life, if a person wants to manipulate, he will always try to give the impression that is the opposite of what he really is. In this example, the bluffer will feign confidence and bet money quickly. And the one with a good card will wait a while to show that he is considering what to do.

This principle applies in any situation. If someone reacts too quickly and without thinking, they want to demonstrate that they are confident, although in most cases this is not the case. On the contrary, a confident person does not need to prove it to anyone. Anyone who wants to appear confident in himself or whatever, will diligently portray this state and it will always be a little over the edge.

Law enforcement officers note that a person who lies (and therefore is not self-confident) often seeks to show an interest in cooperation. When he is asked the simplest question, he depicts the intense work of thought. Thus, he tries to prove that he wants to be useful to the investigation.

Another manifestation of overcompensation may be a person's desire to show his psychological superiority.

The man walked the girl to the door of her house, and she tells him: "It's getting late and I'm going to go to bed." If he likes her but lacks self-confidence, he will think it's a ploy to get rid of him. He might respond with something like, “I'm tired too. In any case, I had no intention of staying." In this way, he tries not to seem discouraged. If he simply says, “Of course you are tired,” this means that he is not trying to control perception by explaining what he is not asked about.

Sign 2. Unnecessary gestures

Any excessive gestures in a serious situation show that the person wants to appear calm and confident. For example, law enforcement officers know that a suspect may yawn to feign complete calm and even boredom. If a person is sitting, they can slouch or stretch, demonstrating complete comfort. Or he can pretend to be absorbed in some nonsense like shaking dust off his clothes, and, therefore, nothing bothers him. The only problem is that the one who is unjustly accused will rather show quite understandable indignation and will not pay attention to trifles or to the “correct” image.

The investigator meets with the parents of a girl who may have been kidnapped. The father tells him that maybe the girl is already dead. After a while he takes a cup of coffee. If, in addition, he says: “I am so grateful to you, I just need this after a hard day,” he is clearly trying to control perception and tries to appear polite and delicate, which raises great doubts about the authenticity of this whole story.

Another example of deliberate behavior is an attempt to show differences. A person suddenly abruptly changes his usual behavior, although there is no reason for this. In this case, he is also trying to depict something that is not really there.

A real estate agent meets his potential client on a Sunday morning. The client is dressed in a suit and tie, with his mobile phone, and he is waiting for an "important" call. He has no money.

Technics. Creating a Threat Situation

If we are not confident enough in ourselves, then in a threatening situation, signs of anxiety will become more pronounced. When a person is surrounded by people who he thinks look better in every way than himself, his self-confidence decreases. This is always true, even if there is no cause for alarm.

If we give a person information that may cause him concern, we can accurately assess how comfortable he feels in this situation. If there are changes in behavior - for example, he becomes aggressive, rude, inattentive, or shows signs of nervousness, then he feels insecure here.

The investigator interrogates the suspect, and the suspect appears confident. It is not known whether he is guilty or not, but he has an ironclad alibi. Then the investigator informs the suspect that another witness is about to come and everything will immediately become clear. The suspect will remain calm if he thinks that he has nothing to fear, or he will become irritable and restless if he is not sure of himself.

© Lieberman D. Alien soul of darkness? How to read the mind of any person. - M.: Piter, 2010.
© Published with the permission of the publisher

An attentive person will not disregard the sensual experiences of another. Why? Because experiences, or excitement, are behaviors that go beyond the usual. Therefore, at all times people have been interested in recognizing the signs of such sensations and their causes. Since ancient times, mankind has invented various ways to find out that a person is worried. To better understand the topic, you need to understand why we all get a wave of unpleasant feelings from time to time.

Why are we worried?

There can be many reasons for concern. This can be a period of acute love, when one thought about the subject of love makes the heart beat faster. A person is acutely experiencing the expectation of a meeting with the object of love, and when meeting with him, the excitement, as they say, can go off scale.

Or a person may worry in anticipation of the unknown - for example, before meeting a stranger or before an event that goes beyond the ordinary. This feeling can be pleasant (for example, waiting for the moment of marriage or the wedding night) or unpleasant (for example, waiting for a plane flight, if you are basically afraid of heights).

Often a person is worried when he does wrong or tells a lie. However, many people also experience when they need to defend their innocence. How to understand where is one, where is the other, and in general, how do you determine that a person is very worried?

What unites these signs?

If we combine all these cases, we can conclude that excitement overtakes us in those moments when we are not confident in ourselves. Therefore, it has always been important for human relationships to understand the cause of this feeling, whether it is one's own or a manifestation of another person's anxiety.

In this case, if someone behaves differently, how do you determine that the person is very worried?

This question has always preoccupied humanity.

One of the causes of a person's excitement is a lie. Therefore, since the first human communities began to form, it has become extremely important to identify lies. Why? In the Bible, the enemy of God, Satan, is called the father, that is, the progenitor of lies (the word "Satan" is translated as "adversary", and the second well-known nickname of this spiritual person is "devil", "slanderer"). Therefore, on earth it was important to identify those who did not live according to the laws of God, but according to the laws of his opponent and slanderer, for such people necessarily became criminals.

That is why the first statesmen of human society were not presidents or even kings, but judges.

One way to identify the perpetrator is to look for signs of agitation. For example, how do you determine that a person is very worried, visually? His mouth tends to dry out, and

In ancient times, for example, in ancient China, a suspected lie was given a handful of dry rice in his mouth at the time the accusation was read out. If the rice remained dry at the end of the reading, it was declared guilty. And in Africa, suspects in a crime had to pass each other (while the judge told the audience the essence of the crime) a fragile bird's egg. It was believed that the guilty, being unable to cope with his excitement, inevitably crushed the eggshell in his palms.

Both then and now, excitement was an indirect sign of a crime committed.

How to determine excitement by external signs?

This question has always been relevant. If we want to understand ourselves and our neighbor, we want to understand the reason for our own and the other person's agitation. And for this we must first determine the moment when our spirit begins to disturb something. Then we will understand why a person is worried. For an attentive interlocutor, everything is extremely transparent.

1. The first obvious sign of excitement is rapid breathing and often redness of the skin of the face. At the moment this feeling arises, a person experiences acute internal discomfort, which causes rapid breathing, the body tries to eliminate the lack of oxygen caused by a more frequent heartbeat, and the face turns red for the same reason - due to increased blood flow. By the way, nostrils often swell due to rapid breathing.
2. The person blinks or squints their eyes frequently. As an option - the so-called "shifting eyes". This is due to the fact that, having lost control over their emotions, a person cannot focus on something specific - a conversation, an act.
3. Because of (the ancient Chinese were right!), lips also dry. Therefore, a person often licks or bites them.
4. We all know that a person can tremble with fear. Nervous trembling is a clear sign of excitement.
5. Often perspiration appears above the upper lip or on the forehead. Increased sweating is a reaction of some hormones to the increased activity of others.
6. Trying to hide the excitement, a person is exaggeratedly focused on some insignificant work of the hands - he twirls the ring on his finger, pulls at the edge of the clothes, etc. Or, on the contrary, he does it completely unconsciously.

How to determine the excitement of the voice?

Since anxiety is an internal discomfort associated with the fact that a person is temporarily out of his usual way of life, he is given out by signs that are difficult to control by will. How do you determine that a person is worried by his voice? The answer is simple: for any changes in the voice. It can be a tremor, a change in timbre, all associated with the same dry mouth. This may be a change in the rate of speech. For example, a person begins to speak more slowly, because, trying to cope with excitement, he focuses on thinking over phrases. But more often he talks incessantly and speaks outright nonsense. And if you hear it, there are no other signs of how to understand that a person is worried.

Often, trying to cope with excitement and control their speech, a person speaks through his teeth.

And yet it is worth bearing in mind: all of the above does not always mean excitement

First, insecure and shy people almost always experience anxiety symptoms: their face turns red, their mouth dries, their hands sweat, and their voice trembles. But after you determine that a person is very worried, and tell him about it, you will be very surprised. Because only then you will see what real excitement is. Insecure people are completely lost when they are told about the external manifestations of their feelings.

Secondly, anxiety as a temporary state is on a par with anxiety, and to understand where one ends and the second begins is often beyond the power of even experienced psychologists.

Being nervous is bad, we already know that. But what exactly is the harm, and what happens to the body when a person is nervous? We decided to find out.

What's happening?

At the moment when the internal self-control of a person fails, and he begins to get nervous, the whole organism begins to be included in the process. At the very beginning, a spasm of blood vessels and muscles occurs in a person, which begin to contract involuntarily. These spasms provoke an insignificant movement of the internal organs, which, nevertheless, is enough to compress the blood vessels. Because of this, the blood stops flowing to the organs in the right amount, which leads to oxygen starvation. This is the most common cause of migraines.

In addition to the above difficulties, a hormone begins to be produced in the body of a "nervous" person, which subsequently poisons and destroys the body. This is the well-known hormone cortisol. As often happens, what should initially help us in one circumstance can be very harmful in others. Same story with cortisol. Playing a key role in the body's defense reactions, it is thrown out "idle" in large concentrations and is often capable of destroying brain cells and muscles.

What to do?

Regardless of the situation that stirred up your calmness, or your state of health, when a person is nervous, the same mechanisms occur in the body. Another question is that if a person initially cannot boast of good health, then constant stress and nervousness can significantly aggravate the situation. Therefore, you should practice stress resistance. First advice: take "anti-stress" trace elements, which are potassium and magnesium.

Second tip: breathe deeply. This helps not so much morally as physiologically: you nourish the brain cells with the missing oxygen. Tip #3: Build resilience. Practice proves that habit and discipline extend to the body's response to stress.