I Cover My Mouth When I Talk to People

Reader’s Question

I’ve recently noticed that I frequently cover my mouth and/or chin with my hands when speaking to people, especially when I’m nervous or with those I don’t feel comfortable with, like superiors at work. I don’t remember ever doing this when I was younger; I think I developed the habit sometime within the last year. When I’m conscious of it I can remove my hands with effort but feel exposed. I have no deformities on my mouth or chin (or the rest of my face, for that matter) and have never been teased excessively for the way I look.

I am a 23 year old woman, graduated from college a year ago and am working at my first full-time job. I have a fairly stable life in terms of friends, family, finances, etc., or at least typical for my age. I moved to a new city after college but I have moved several times in my life and am quite accustomed to it.

I’ve thought that there must be a psychological reason behind this habit but don’t know enough about psychology to guess at what it might be. Is this a common behavior? How can I get over it? I fear it look unprofessional when I have my hands in my face in meetings!

Our Consulting Clinical Psychologist’s Reply

Everyone has a physical behavior that surfaces when they become stressed. These stress indicators can be nailbiting, hair twirling, covering your mouth, looking downward or avoiding eye contact, clothes picking, toe tapping, fingers in the mouth, skin picking, lip biting, and a host of others. Some of these behaviors are leftovers from childhood habits and self-soothing behaviors while others just seem to surface. Many of these behaviors are well known in our culture, giving rise to such expressions as an event being a “nail-biter”. Poker players call these small behaviors “tells”.

The behavior is associated with stress and anxiety and for that reason, you can use a stress-reduction approach. You can:

• research tips for shyness and anxiety on the Internet,
• take a public speaking class to improve social confidence,
• develop physical strategies such as carrying a clipboard in tense situations, grabbing it with both hands to keep you hands away from your mouth, or
• enter into counseling or treatment programs for social anxiety.

However, there’s another issue here. Stress and anxiety are typically associated with difficult or bad experiences. Stress and anxiety are also part of good, positive, and rewarding experiences. In roughly the last year you have:

• graduated from college,
• left the college environment were people are actually nicer,
• moved to a different city,
• moved to a different living environment,
• moved away from old friends,
• obtained your first “big job”, and
• obtained all new local and work friends.

Each of those events is a stressor, and you’ve probably had a few more. I suspect you are experiencing the accumulated stress of the past year: lots of changes in your life, lots of new experiences, increased expectations for yourself, etc. And the weird thing — it’s all good.

Your situation is not uncommon. Positive changes in our life create stress as well — and this situation often causes emotional meltdowns in celebrities. We see it in the media all the time. As you become more comfortable with your new life, this will disappear. However, that same stress sign will surface anytime you reach a certain stress level. In the future you can use it as your “stress warning light” that tells you to slow down, destress your life, and address the causes of your stress.